FINAL BOSS UPDATE: As of patch 1.14, Radahn's cross slash can now be dodged normally, the VFX in phase 2 are much clearer, and his recovery frames on some moves are a lot more generous. Is he easier? Sure. But he's also way more fun to fight. This is what he should have been at launch.
I don't really know what to say to that, because I think the damage is already done. Fuck knows that Radahn isn't the only boss I have issues with, and I'm not going back to the game just because they fixed him, if even you can call him fixed. One thing's for sure tho, FromSoft isn't getting any of my money anymore, they're going in a direction where I don't wanna play their games anymore
@@Raidon484 people like you get on my fucking nerves, this is the only game they have made which made you feel this way, why are you instantly assuming all of their future games will be like this? the game they made before elden ring was sekiro, whicu pretty much unanimously praised, and then qfter elden ring they made amored core 6 which you seen to have forgotten about or just haven't played for whatever reason. fromsoft have already said that they prefer making new experiences and new IP rather than sequels, and that they don't plan to make any more open world games in the near future. if elden ring wasn't for you, their next game could still be one that is. fromsoft also has multiple directors working on different games, miyazaki is no longer the only one leading the projects, and if that has you worried then keep in mind that sekiro and AC6 did not have very much input from miyazaki yet ended up great. basically my point is that fromsoft will continue making unique games with unique combat systems etc. the soulsborne franchise is pretty much over now with elden ring which was basically the last hurrah of the series which combined everything they have accumulated from past games and put it into a new open world environment, I'm sure fromsoft also knows that the souls style of game cannot go much further than this. TL;DR be patient and wait to see their next game before you say this.
The problem, to make it short, is that they want to make a dmc game instead of sticking to the fundamentals of souls combat. We truly do have reached the limit and instead of polishing what's there fromsoftware wants to one up themselves. They desperately need to make other type of games and give this formula a break, specially seeing how rapidly soul-likes are catching up in terms of quality
There is only so many times you can make a melee-based rpg with the player character being 1/8th the height of every boss chipping away at enemy’s 2000000000 hp in a world where the gods of old have long fallen from their glory days before it get really old
I think most problems people have with souls games come from the fact that only one studio consistently makes good soulslikes but they’re not perfect so they’ll make mistakes too. Thematic changes on top of combat changes change an experience so much but fromsoft couldn’t possibly explore all the potential they created on top of having poor decisions sometimes. Don’t lose hope in soulslikes as a genre, lose hope in fromsoft and then play Lies of P🙏
Some players are still having fun. For me im still in my first playthrough just putting my summon sign to help others :3 elden ring is such a good game❤
I don't understand why movement Ashes of War have to go on weapons and even if it has to be on a weapon, they replace your L2 instead of replacing your dodge button, making you able to have it on something in your offhand. Hell, I don't see why a movement AoW can't be put on Armor to replace your dodge.
DS2 and Elden Ring are probably my two favorites, but there's more I hate about Elden Ring. Actually, that's not entirely true, but most of the things I dislike in DS2 are optional.
Let me guess - Frigid Outskirts? I'm still unsure how I feel about Elden ring, but what I am sure of is that were a lot of areas in it that felt as poorly designed as frigid outskirts (and the worst thing is that I saw the potential of Frigid outskirts and felt that it needed only a few changes to be one of the most interesting experiences in the game... As with Elden ring, the areas that gave me such not fun experiences felt like developers sabotaging their own designs - what I mean by that is that areas like Crumbling Azula and Haligtree looked very cool and interesting, but had too many too annoying enemies, ambushes, ganks, poorly balanced enemies, the most annoying dragons ever... They could've been good if they didn't have so much unnecessary stuff
I also think that with Elden Ring, and especially with Shadow of the Erdtree, Fromsoft has hit the limit of how complex they can make the bosses within the Souls dodge-focused combat system. This is their 5th game with that combat and I think it’s time they move on to a more Sekiro-type combat and innovate on that system as it has a huge potential for crazy anime bosses with never ending combos because it doesn’t require the enemies to have long openings for the player to attack. In Sekiro, defense is the best offense and they can go all out on Inner Father-like bosses and it could be insanely fun. Some of the modded bosses like Ultimate Isshin are amazing and it’d be a shame if From didn’t innovate on such an incredible combat system.
wut.... The whole appeal of Souls games was they AREN'T crazy anime. If Fromsoft moves towards a more Devil May Cry cringe fest they will lose what makes them unique and appealing to non-weebs
@MrNewRevolutionary Well, the thing is, most of the dlc bosses have become crazy over the top anime types. Its like trying to take down fighter jets with a pistol. And when you use the boss weapons and spells. they are a MASSIVE downgrade from the boss version. Some are outright trash. My fav weapon is Rellana's twin blades but you compare it to when she uses and man. She can keep them imbued. have all sorts of cool effects and attack chain and so on. And then you try it and can do only 2 of all the flashy moves, hit less hard etc. The bosses and enemies have evolved but the player character is still same old darksouls wimp who can't die. While it doesn't have go sekiro route, the combat definitely needs a touch up.
@MrNewRevolutionary You missed my point. If the game played like traditional darksouls, that would be fine, but it doesn't. The combat stays the same while the bosses get more and more crazy. It feels like playing against bloodborn or sekiro bosses, but without the combat of either. It doesn't need to be a power fantasy, but it does need an upgrade... or go back to being like it used to be.
Really good video dude. I'm glad you brought up the topic of exploration and navigation becoming easier over time with each iteration, and how that inevitably affects the boss design and the pressure the developers feel to live up to their reputation of difficulty, its something I feel most people tend to not think about. As someone who always appreciated the level and encounter design, story telling, atmosphere and art direction over the combat itself in these games, it saddens me to see more and more of this obsessive fixation on boss fights, both from the community and fromsoft themselves. At the expense of almost everything else this series used to do so well.
I think I feel more positively about this DLC than you, but your critiques are valid and echo many of my own, and you give the devil his due and acknowledge the things you liked about this DLC in a fair way. Part of what keeps me from being too pessimistic about Fromsoft's future output is that they put out Armored Core 6 in between Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree. That fact is easy to forget for people like us who mostly like the Souls formula, but it is a monumental feat. I never cared about Armored Core previously, only tuning in to From's work in the era Demon's Souls kicked off. But AC6 ended up as my GOTY 2023, when I thought Baldur's Gate 3 had already settled that issue earlier in the year. This is the studio that followed up Dark Souls 2 with Bloodborne, and followed up Dark Souls 3 with Sekiro. From has creative juice to spare, and has proven they're willing to try new things, even if they've just iterated on something familiar. I really appreciate your style. This is a wonderfully level-headed video in a field crowded with sensationalism and overstatement. I'm happy to be your 2nd dozenth subscriber. In on the ground floor before that counter hits the dozens of thousands. Keep it up sir.
I loved AC6 probably should have mentioned it as another reason why I'm not overly pessimistic about the future. I hope to see more projects like AC6 for sure
It should be noted that Miyazaki said the narrative and base of Shadow of The Erdtree was already established before the DLC by him and GRRM. And I disagree with the story being the same as it always has, primarily because of the NPC’s and nature of the narrative’s unfolding. More so than the base game, character motivations, actions and the plot are much more clear on top of each character having their own divergent quest lines that eventually intersect. People don’t like the gank fight but in terms of narrative, it’s the most important moment aside from the ending. All of these characters interacting with, conversing with and going to war for different reasons. It makes the plot emergent in a way no other game prior has. You’re not just a person wandering into a conflict that’s happened, you’re in the epicenter
Maybe AC6 development is the very reason that SOTE has so many signs of lacking polish, like empty worlds, poor technical performance and unbalanced gameplay, all things that should be caught by any decent playtesting team. They either lacked proper and timely testing or the development resources to address issues before release.
See, I don't quite know whether or not to agree with the creativity thing. On one hand, areas are stunning as always, the visuals are by no means anything to scoff at. On the other hand, there are parts of the experience that make me feel like they're running out of ideas: moves or entire bosses copied from previous games with basically a new coat of paint are one thing. Then there's the constant reuse of shit. Everywhere and anywhere you go, even in the dlc they couldn't refrain from reusing bosses. Was the fallingstar beast and the 4 ulcerated tree spirits necessary or are they just padding? Romina is Quelaag adjacent enemy Nr. 573 in my opinion. But it really comes through with the final boss: first off all, Radahn again. No matter what you do, it's Radahn again. Then he's basically also Lorian and Lothric but Lorian isn't paraplegic. And the way in which you access the final cutscene reminds me strongly of Bloodborne's dlc. The swords you get as a reward are the same sword twice and it took me someone shoving me into it face first to notice the fucking difference between these swords and the base game Radahn sword. The fact that Mohg is the vessel for Radahn is honored by one move and and some horns growing out of him. And the final cutscene tells you a conclusion all the rest of the dlc's story worked like hell to make you stumble over, meaning working to find this out on your own was wasted time, except maybe the darkness in the cutscene is there so some theory crafters can speculate on the implications this has on Radahn missing a testicle (sorry, had to vent that one). The interconnectivity with the base game is nada, zilch, zero, something we had in every other game and was prime real estate in this one. The remembrance bosses feel really out of place in a way that's hard to describe... Fucking hell, Gaius' weapon is a regular smithing stone weapon! There is zero reason for that other than someone forgetting to change it after he was made a remembrance boss as padding. There is a second dancing lion. They learned fucking nothing from people's reaction to Astel and Godefroy. This doesn't scream creativity to me. The only thing really creative here seem to be the visuals. That's about it. The combat system seems to largely be the same as DS, maybe a bit further evolved but if changing the formula of a years old game the slightest counts as creativity I don't know what doesn't. Hell, I'd argue any day that the combat got worse, so what do I know. But everything else screams "running out of ideas" straight into my face with a megaphone.
Building on parry-based Sekiro combat is one obvious direction they could take, and I would welcome it. But I think a much more important step would be to either remove s completely or restrict them to more sporadically used special moves. Like you point out in the video, the s-based dodges often feel downright silly and I also have the suspicion that they're a big reason for the arms race FS is in with boss fights. Think of how many of the more annoying habits of ER's bosses are a direct response to roll-spamming. So I think getting rid of the incentive for that entirely could be a great first step to evolve the formula.
have you played armored core 6? that game has 0 I frames, you just get a quickboost dodge that helps you reposition around attacks, and the only "I frames" you can get are from a plasma shield you have yo equip (which I have never used) and some limited use super moves that put a forcefield around your mech that lasts about 5 seconds. it's exactly what you're looking for.
@@ramen3643 I love that game, have played it to death, currently going through older AC games while waiting for a DLC or sequel. I didn't mention it, but it was one of the games that made me notice the problem with i frames.
The souls combat system just needs more sekiro style parrying, bloodborne style dodging and more group fights/ battle scenes. The deflecting hardtear is a step in the right direction but the visual feedback isn't as satisfying as sekiro's where you truly believe your watching an epic sword fight. The combat system going forward needs the aesthetic focus sekiro and bloodborne's combat systems had. We have to "believe" whats going on, on screen. More fights with multiple allies vs multiple enemies would be cool too.
Honestly, I kind of hate the hardtear. It turns any discussion about challenge or game/build advice into “just use this completely game changing tear” and kills it.
both sekiro parrying and bb dodging already exist in ER through a physick and weapon art. Group fight wouldnt be that great considering the npc gank fight at the end of SOTE
@@Scowleasy I don't think it does. It's simply another option that still requires skill to master to change the flow of defensive combat from Dodge/Parry/Block. It's really the midpoint of Bloodborne's Guns (safe and easy parries for high intensity, reckless aggression) and Sekiro's Deflections (the center of fast, violent, thoughtful combat).
I just want to say that this might be the best review on SOTE that I have watched. Your criticisms were very fair and you articulated them well. It’s quite rare to see in these long videos.
Same engine, same gameplay loop, same quest structure, same…everything basically. Oh, there’s guns in Fallout so yeah, I guess it is a completely different game.
I like the more critical approach to from software I feel like a lot off the time ppl dismissed the problems with these games too quickly I would even say they your criticism was a bit soft at times but I share your sentiment for the most part the combat need more
Oh people definitely are defending and giving from way too much credit with elden ring in some areas. This game already has the biggest number of analysis where everything is a mixed bag. The only other title that surpass elden ring here is dark souls 2 for obvious reasons. There are 3 main reasons for this : the horrible state of the industry, the fault of the gamers with how weird they are, and bias of comfort they tend to have with certain things or developers.
Really good video, all your points are well articulated, and you didn't sit on a point for too long; you made your point and moved on to the next segment. Keep it up, I'm glad i found your channel.
One thing that struck me while watching this video is one big difference betweenn the flask upgrades in the base game (sacred tears and golden seeds) and the Scadutree Fragments. The flask upgrades are inherently "lose-less" upgrades, they help you survive longer in fights, and thus die fewer times, both against bosses and the environment. The Scadutree blessing affecting your damage output as well as your core survivability (how many hits you can take at once rather than over time) makes them lean more strongly towards "win-more". Thus when you upgrade your flask it lets you make more mistakes. When you upgrade the Scadutree blessing it makes the fight shorter but with largely the same room for error.
Your video completly explains why every attempt to fix elden ring felt like a bandaid instead of an actual solution. It also explains why i end up wanting to play sekiro instead 😂.
Amazing review. I'm still slightly conflicted if I should buy it, since I had quite a bit of problems with the base game(still haven't completed it and am currently attempting to learn Malenia's fight), namely the boss fights(there were only few ones that I truly found fun so far), some levels having too much and too annoying types of enemies, exploration being hit or miss, dragon and wyrm fights(actually most big enemies in general)... I have a lot of problems with it, but I did love some parts of it, like Leyndell, the royal capital, overall art direction, some NPCs ... I don't know, I'm still conflicted....
I love Elden ring, I hate shadow of the erdtree, I put so many hours into the base game on ps5, played sote on ps5, just got a pc, wanted to get Elden ring on pc, but sote left such a sour taste in my mouth that I’m constantly debating whether or not to get the pc version. I beat sote once before any patches, haven’t been back since
A fair and eloquent critique. For me, SotE was incredible in many ways but it also doubled down on so many of the issues I had with Elden Ring in general. After being blown away by Sekiro It was disappointing to learn that Fromsoft would follow up with a super XL expanded version of the exact same type of game that Dark Souls 3 capped off perfectly in The Ringed City.
@@Scowleasy Pretty terrible example tbh. Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring are the exact same in how the Estus/ Healing flask is given to the player. Fromsoft would never put a key component to the gameplay of a video game behind a missable or optional quest, that’s absolutely absurd to even think to argue. That’s like saying if dodging or moving was locked behind some obscure quest. No fundamental part of the gameplay will ever be put as a quest reward, never has and never will. Think before you speak please.
I don't think that they meant you could simply miss getting your estus, I think it was more about Oscar as a character, but while it would feel very weird not meeting any NPCs until firelink and not hearing what Oscar has to say, doesn't narrator tell the exact same thing as Oscar? So what I'm trying to say, Oscar isn't essential to the story, but the Asylum would feel emptier/less meaningful without him. So... What was I trying to say?
I agree with all of your points. This was the first From DLC that didn't surpass the main game for me. I have faith that they will continue to improve though, and I look forward to the next release.
6:55 You have to dodge a billion+ times to make any build work. Thats the problem with this new design. Its not fun. Sometimes Im mid fight and just stop dodging like F it Ima vibe to this death and then lose all my souls and give 0 fux. Thats the DLC.
Shadow of the erdtree was definitely an additional experiment as was the base game eldenring. The dlc was very vertical in the map layout, working out how to make future maps feel truly 3D. It reminded me of a metroid style game
I don't think it worked at all. Super Metroid is tiny compared to SotE with its giant open fields and wide corridors to pour over, and in that vastness are hidden incredibly miniscule details you can miss which are the only way to unlock entire regions of the map. One of course is the hidden wall leading down to the abyss woods. I don't think it's good to mix this kind of huge vastness with tiny details. Do I have to inspect every single rock? Look at every bit of rubble from every single angle? Do I have to walk towards every single dead end and look off every cliff? The vertical map creates kind of a fake open world where you can't really get anywhere other than the field you're currently in. And with these tiny little details like needles in haystacks, that just happen to lead to something important like a huge new area or fragments, how do the giant open areas fit and why are they necessary? They're just a bunch of emptiness and cliffs taunting you as you try to figure out how to get down there or how to find the item you need. They should have just stuck with the tight, devious dungeons they have been so good at.
I'm a big fan of this game and the DLC but I must say, the fact that all the weapons are in "categories" and there are no unique weapon animations really really REALLY bugs me
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS Super Metroid is 30 years old, too, but its genre is still highly influential. I do agree this wasn't the best way to tackle it. It still feels that eldenring and SotE was one big test in figuring out how to merge a vertical labyrinth (SotE) and an open world environment (base game)for future game development. I'm curious what takeaway notes Fromsoft gathered in what was considered successful/failure and potential methods in tackling such moving forward.
@@briggy4359 So you'd rather just have less weapons because that's what will happen???? They clearly design moves/animations that make sense for each weapon type. There's only so many of those so... you just want less of each weapon type?
I love that we had such similar takes on the DLC! I really enjoyed most bosses but found the visuals or over-aggression overwhelming at times. I'm interested to go back to Radahn after the VFX updates to see if I can actually tell what's going on now. I do wish Romina and Putrescent Knight were a little more difficult since I really loved their movesets and design, but overall the most fun experiences for me were Rellana, Midra, and Bayle. One thing I actually took issue with was the fact that most roads leading out of the main area that you start in go through the Shadow Keep, but there's nothing (at least to me) indicating that Messmer himself is intended for late DLC scaling. I wish there was some sort of seal locking Messmer's door that you have to find the key to so that you're still encouraged to explore through Shadow Keep early on and venture into the other areas of the map without wandering into Messmer's arena and banging your head against the wall like I did thinking he was just intended to really be That Hard. I think I'd have loved the boss so much more if I'd fought him when I was a more intended level, but placing him somewhere that you have to explore to get literally anywhere else made him seem more to me like he filled the sort of Godrick position of the DLC. Otherwise I had such mirrored opinions to a lot of what you said. Most areas were visually stunning to the point that I had to sit and take it in when I got to a new place but then actually roaming around the areas felt like I was searching for something to do with a magnifying glass. It felt like lots of empty time. I'll definitely be interested to see how they adapt in future soulslike titles, especially with actual competition like Lies of P coming out and sort of using their own formula but doing it better in a lot of ways. I think they've hit the same point as Pokemon where they've pushed their original formula so far that they have almost no choice but to try and overhaul some things for better or worse if they want to stay fresh. I remember being new to the series with Elden Ring and being absolutely baffled when I realized that you could dodge THROUGH fire giant's massive shield with i-frames, it's getting the the point where the bigger and crazier the bosses get, the more it just feels like it doesn't make sense to play which I think makes those fights less engaging overall. Playing Shadow of the Erdtree after games like Lies of P, Sekiro, and Stellar Blade definitely made me realize how much tighter and more specialized combat can be when not everything is about an i-frame.
I'm normally not one to comment on UA-cam videos, but although I do have some disagreements, but the main thesis about From stretching the simplistic combat to its limits while being stagnated is spot on. I'm glad this pretty good video critique dropped on my feed despite being late butttt eh, so here's to the algorithm. o7 I'm glad to see more thoughtful criticism, especially from someone like you who still enjoys the more standard bosses but can still see the issues without being insufferable. As someone who used to be big on sl1/bl4 and mastering bosses, after Elden Ring and especially SOTE, I just can't be bother to do so anymore. There's still bosses that I like and can no-hit with no issues, Maliketh, Placidusax, Starscourge Radahn, Bayle (if the camera and fire breath behaves), and Mogh as examples. It's just getting tiring, and I just hope Fromsoft either tones it back and introduces new ideas and other forms of difficulty that aren't artificial/exclusive to bosses and enemies (like making levels challenging again, i.e., Blighttown, Lateria, Sen's Fortress). Or as said here, just go and make a proper action game if they just want to double down. I have some issues with Sekrio, but I wouldn't mind if they expanded on the combat and world. Hell, I'll take that over an Elden Ring 2 where it'll likely be the same experience, but now even more artificial difficulty and more reused assists with bland level design with overly generous checkpoints and basic enemy encounters that either basically a mini-boss, ambushes the player in the corner or a gank. Personally, I think the biggest issue with the soul games is that are becoming more and more predictable, and to me, at least is becoming boring. It's likely where people (particularly vets like myself) are starting to become fatigued. It's been a while since I've played SOTE, and for the first time for a soul game, I don't want to replay it. I tried but ultimately just couldn't. It mostly comes down with the frustrations of skibbiscat fragments, the level design for me personally being mostly bland or rehashes of ideas I've seen before in previous in the titles that I've played to death with the same combat since Demon's Soul's. The verticality is nice but it doesn't flow well for me at least compared to DS1 or Bloodborne. Doesn't help that most of the bosses are mediocre/ repeats from the base game. I do still go through base game from time to time as it's much easier to get through the bland stuff (Leyndell, Stormviel and Farum are soild levels so that helps). I just want to be surprised again with the cool and weird moments of this series rather than the current focus on just pretty vistas and the bosses, who are just becoming rehashes of previous fights from the past games but with more visual clutter and janky movesets designed solely for the reputation of difficulty. As much as I find enjoyment in bosses like Maliketh and Bayle, they are just supercharged versions of Artorias and Midir, respectively. That goes without saying Rellena is just reuses the same themes as Pontiff, Romina is just another variant visually as Qualaag and Nástka. Hell Messmer, although good overall, has the same themes of Rykard (who is a rehash of the Storm King and Yhorm) but now a standard humanoid boss (i.e, snakes, fire, sin). The lore is a mess coming from a lore nerd. I did enjoy ER's lore, not my favorite but it was also not full of plot holes like Bloodborne's Executors and Bloodviles conflict or DS2's and especially DS3's lore. Too bad the DLC decided to fuck it up, mostly with Miquella and Radahn as Radahn's story was complete and needed no expansion. My boy Messmer got shafted, he deserves better. Don't get me started on how dumb DLC Miquella's plan is. It's just hard to be optimistic as I have seen this same situation happen to other once beloved franchises/companies. They see their golden goose and start playing it too safe, too predictable, and ultimately, too boring. Hopefully I get proven wrong.
Subbed mate, I hope you get the recognition you deserve, actual opinions without either rose tinted glasses or corporate interests are rarer than you think this platform these days!
I think all your arguments are on point here. I think FS pushed the limits of their combat system to the point of breaking and the only ppl who disagree are the ashes of cheese users and non-vet souls players. ER is a good game but its not a GREAT game sadly bc it really lacks replay ability that the past games still have. For those making the argument that it does are just wanting some sort of target to beat up on w/ ease bc each time you play thru the game gets easier and limiting your build really starts to show the flaws in the design and why it looses replay ability. I'm also very concerned for FromSoftware's future to the point where I will not be pre-ordering their next title bc I want to make sure its not going to be a further extension of what ER is bc if so its going to be a hard pass for me and this is coming from a guy who has 2000+ hrs combine of all Soul's game except DS2 as I've never played it. At this point my fav's of the series is DS3 & BB. DS1 is also up there but due to my evolution as a player its hard to get challenge out of that game now even as an SL1 run but it's def one of my favs especially w/ the best world design I've experienced.
I agree that with companies like Bethesda and Ubi, they stagnated after they released their respective peaks. but I feel like it also has to do with the fact that at the time, up and coming games like Dark Souls were released that shook things up and made their game design look stale in comparison. FS is in a unique position bcs I feel like no other AAA company can give Fromsoft adequate competition where they should really feel that pressured, especially in the open world genre. Some might argue Wukong as a contender but despite being really good, I don’t think that game is really that innovative in terms of showing us things we haven’t seen before, and I also don’t think that game would do quite as well if it wasn’t for its homebase Chinese audience (since most of them get firewalled from playing foreign releases). All of this to say I still don’t think From should feel complacent tho, all it takes is one amazing game to reduce them to a has-been.
I've watched a alot of critiques and this was by far the best. You balanced your personal taste against the more general palate in a way that tied purely logistical problems with the more thematic/abstract ones. If you wanted something constructive I'd say having a simple concise question (one one that gets at the overarching themes of the problems) to call back to and hammer home is nice particularly in a long video like this. I sure a shit produce a critique like this or what I suggested though. Keen to see your next vid
Holy shit only 600 views! My man, you are underrated. Im sharing. I think for a next game they should push their expanded playerbase more in the direction of sekiro/bloodborne playstyle. Its the only way that the same combat system will still feel fresh and rewarding enough. From artorias, fume knight, penetrator, owl (2nd), maria, and now rellana, the fast paced humanoid dances will never ever tire me out.
This is actually a good critique. Most critiques are ragebaiting about bosses having long combos and no opening and complaining that they actually have to learn the boss(which was the same in every other souls game btw) and saying nothing positive in return. But thankfully this was actually a very well put together video, keep up the work
Fromsoft needs to make smaller games or break up their projects into multiple expansions and eliminate all repetition and filler. Make the open areas smaller with more concentration, make fewer but longer and more complex minor dungeons and make larger legacy dungeons. They also need to really focus on balancing the combat and create more depth and complexity for the combat. There needs to be fewer weapons with each being unique with varied, complex movesets. Especially boss and legendary weapons. They also need to nerf rolling and make positioning, blocking, deflecting and parrying more effective. Spell casting needs an overhaul. You should be able to assign spells to different buttons and have a spell wheel. Spells should also do the most damage point blank and do less damage the further away you are. Magic should also regenerate like stamina. They should also make classes more distinct so that your choice of class actually matters and influences play style. They should also add the quick dodge and rally from Bloodborne. The rally system was the best innovation Fromsoft ever made along with Sekiro's deflect and parry system. Rally makes getting hit way more lenient and offers another mechanic for combat. They need to make fewer bosses, properly tune them for the player combat and not repeat main bosses.
You know its almost somewhat fitting really on how absurd the combat has gotten. Like at DLC's end you are facing down a frankenstien's monster abomination of a demigod and a god who has achieved the peak of his strength. An idea that in previous souls games would have been considered insane. Most gods and monsters are narritively depowered but here its like the kid gloves are off. A final exam that is not holding back. On a hype perspecitve it makes me look back on the journey fromsoft went through as a whole but it does also concern me on what they could posiibly do in the future to keep up with the arms race.
@@Stanzbey69 Now hold your horses. I'm not saying that this design is bad. I'm not one of those git gud types. I'm just saying that it has gotten more complex, a complexity I like actually. I'm actually kind of disappointed in the Radahn nerf a little bit because it kinda loses the narrative punching power a bit. I loved going into the fight with a variety of builds. Making builds is my favorite part of the game to be honest. Be it magic, melee, bleed, hell summons are gonna be fun too when i get around to it. Mostly because the deck was stacked against you very purposefully. You are supposed to use every trick in the book to beat this monster and it's a mindset that I love using when going back to older titles and using new strategies there. Elden ring has taught me skill is great, but using your brain is better.
@@TheUltimateMachineGod oh my bad, thought u were one of those ‘hi guys, souls vet here, the game sucks because it isn’t jank slop like ds1’. Glad it was just a misunderstanding. These critique vids have melted my brain with their horrible takes.
@@Stanzbey69 hey as nostalgic at ds1 really is I admit there are some things in that game that age poorly. It will still be a classic in my heart though. Hell honestly makes me envy not having an actual jump would've made bed of chaos a bit more tolerable too tbh.
@@Stanzbey69 Bruh you're just hating because those games were made precisely with their limited resources. It can feel kinda janky but atleast the game is made to match your limited movement. In elden ring it really doesnt make any sense when you're fighting gods at their peak. Everyone moves and attacks like they're at their peak, which is just nearly impossible to fight against. Also jumping works rarely and most of the time rolling works just as well. I swear yall have a humiliation kink or something. Every single person repeats the: "Miyazaki really showed us what his games are about haha!" slogan like you're in a cult or something. Yall cant comprehend a boss (that isnt clearly gimmicky and just bad like bed of chaos or something) that is insanely hard could be designed poorly. Bosses should have clear telegraphs and not stuff like rellana, in all of her attacks she pauses, swings again, pauses, swings again, pauses, roll catch, and then pauses, and then suddenly stops combo. I know you're a god in gaming and you can find obnoxious stuff like that fun to learn, but even an above average player will just have to resort to atleast semi op stuff to just get it over with. I got like 300 hours in elden ring and i try to explore everything in the game, i like the scadutree fragments, but saying "oh just go explore if its too hard for you!" really doesnt do anything, because it doesnt fix the fact that the attacks are way too hard and really not fun to learn.
I think the sales will bear out the strategy of combining RPG with this 10 year old combat system. Sekiro sales were smaller in comparison- the best-selling Souls copies recently show that this now familiar structure is a huge market to tap for many years à la GTA.
I think what sucks to me about the scadutree fragments/revered spirit ashes, and the exploration being generally unrewarding in terms of item rewards, is that it could have been easily fixed imo. The level for scadutree blessings and spirit upgrades should have been raised, even if it meant less immediately noticeable change in your damage/resistances per level. Make all of the current scadutree fragments/revered spirit ashes considered "greater", and have them give you a large boost of like 3-4 levels. Then replace a majority of the redundant items like smithing stones and cookbooks with "lesser" fragments/ashes that only serve to level your blessing up once with an increase in required items to get more levels the higher your level is, like how it is in the current version. I dunno, maybe that isn't as good a fix as I think, I'm not a game designer. I feel like they came so close to solving the issue of DLC scaling but made one small mistake and it snowballed into several aspects of the DLC feeling underwhelming. It sucked being walled by Gaius because I knew I needed to get the fragments past his arena, but feeling like he did way too much damage even with a decent blessing level. I beat him after a while but by that point I'd gone back to Dark Souls III and don't know when I'll get around to finishing SotE because I'm so burnt out on it.
nothing changed from oblivion to skyrim to fallout 4 to starfield. we just raised our standards. bethesda always made dogwater games, buggy, broken games
Just finished the land of shadow part and I feel like you give the legacy dungeons too much credit. I think the shadow keep is the only area that deserves the legacy dungeon denomination. Belurat and Enir-Illim come close, but they don’t measure up to the 6 main legacy dungeons of the main game. I found this to be extremely disappointing given the fact that as you mentioned, the open world was even more empty than the main game. Even then, I don’t think shadow keep reaches the heights of say Stormveil Castle, Crumbling Farum Azula or Lyendell. The enemy variety is too low. My hopes for a more condensed map and even better legacy dungeons were just not met. Glad you mentioned blood and wine because it is a DLC of similar scope to SOTE and yet it turned out to be better for half the price.
I certainly hope I don’t grow disdainful of the makeup of Fromsoft games like I did with Bethesda. I played Fallout 4 and suddenly couldn’t remember what I enjoyed about those games in the first place. Haven’t touched anything Bethesda since. I became disillusioned w their design philosophy as a whole because of their refusal to evolve it over time. Is Fromsoft not comparable when the same camera issues persist across 15 years of games for example.
Man...i get saying how the dlc is disappointing. But it feels pretty unfair to harp on how FromSoft has fallen off. I mean, theres been plenty of evidence that theyre interested in new directions. Sekiro back in 2019, Armored Core last year, the interview you brought up at the end of the video. Mikizaki even said he wasnt going to try to try to follow the success from Elden Ring- which even the base game was a cool experience. This is the same group that ended Dark Souls at 3 of their own volition evwn though the fans would have, at the time, wanted more. And with the DLC, from my impression(havent played it) i think they did an admirable job at trying to reinvent their method of making a DLC to be true to what Elden Ring was about. Im not a FS fanboy, nor have i played the DLC. It just doesnt seem fair, all things considered
I'm not bothered that there is boss just as hard as Malenia in the DLC. I'm bothered that it is specifically the final boss, the one a player needs to beat to bring the main story of the DLC to a close. Contrast this with the base game, where not only is Malenia not the final boss, she's a secret boss sequestered away in a hidden zone that most casual players might never even find without looking up a guide. The equivalent in the DLC should have been something like Midra, not Miquella's Consort. ... Otherwise, however, Ivery much agree that one of the bigger problems with the DLC isn't necessarily the raw difficulty of the bosses in a vacuum, but rather in contrast to how increasingly easy the level navigation an regular enemies are. In older games just getting to the boss was half the challenge of beating the game, but now it feels like the bosses are the ONLY challenge and it's made the whole experience feel lopsided at best, if not entirely disjointed at worst. It used to be in older games that as long as my build was good enough to reach a boss, it would also be good enough to beat that boss. In Shadows of the Erdtree, however, for the first time ever I found myself having to juggle between two separate gear loadouts. During exploration I felt still free entirely free to experiment and customize my character for flavor, but during boss fights I increasingly felt the need to resort to only the most mechanically optimized options. By the time I finally scraped out a win against the DLC's final boss, I derived no real satisfaction because my character no longer really felt like my own. Yeah, the whole combat formula probably needs a full overhaul, but honestly, I'd settle for just a more balanced overall experience that doesn't rely entirely on over the top bosses and instead puts some of the challenge back into basic level design and the standard enemies which populate it. I want a game that teaches me the lessons I need to learn throughout the entire the journey, not a cakewalk that does nothing to prepare me for a final exam difficulty spike. If all I cared about was super tough bosses, there are boss rush games that cut out everything else in-between entirely.
There’s just very little reason to even fight the dlc final boss. The items are meh, you *definitely* don’t need the runes, the “ending” is empty, and up until 1.14 the fight itself was mid to terrible. The 1.14 patch did a lot to make the fight more enjoyable, but even then it’s still a lower point for the dlc.
It's the horse and the open world. You can just run past anything that threatens you. Somehow this feels like it extended into the dungeons themselves. Feels like there's hardly any level design in SotE.
@@Scowleasy: It's not really about whether the rewards or the ending itself are underwhelming. It's about having closure, about being able to finish what was started. It's fine for Melania to be so hard some players might never beat her, and that the rewards for doing so arguably aren't worth the effort, because she's side content. It would be a whole different thing entirely if Elden Beast was that hard. Ostensibly some people might try to argue the entire DLC is just side content, but the difference is that unlike Melenia, it's side content with a separate price of admission.
@@EmeralBookwise except there isn’t any closure. We just get a lame cutscene of something we’ve already been told multiple times. After you beat PCR the first time, there really isn’t any reason to do it again.
@@Scowleasy: The closure isn't about the cutscene, it's about finishing the game and being able to close the book on the story without nagging feeling that giving up would have. I will entirely agree that having done it once, however, I feel no desire to ever do it again.
Great video! I especially liked the lore criticisms. The dlc's world felt unsatisfying and empty for me. I was desperatrely waiting for the lore to get better but the ending just made it much much worse and I didn't like how they handled Miquella's plotline tbh.
Lots of cool threads but it feels like the pinnacle of Miyazaki's "half-trabslated book" philosophy. I personally love that style, but I totally get why people don't care for it.
Ha! Joke's on all of you, I saw star wars in Episode order. Of course I knew who Darth Vader was to Luke, and I spent all of Episode IV pretty mad at Obi-wan for not telling the poor kid.
Bad take after bad take, same with the whole comments section. I’ve seen this exact video from Feeble king and Joseph Anderson before. “Boss too hard, world too empty, story not make sense”. It’s all the same. Almost everything you complained about can be applied to every souls game there ever was, your just too lazy to care about the game, learn it, and find out what it has to offer. Wasn’t a problem the first Dark Souls.
A vid this long will take me 2 days to watch but I've gotten through the early part of the critique. I agree that the scadu tree blessings are poopy. I like the barren landscapes better than the base game though. I hard agree with your Lore critiques so far.
I completely agree with your sentiment at the beginning. I grew up with Morrowind, still one of my all time favs. When Fallout 4 dropped, it was good, but it just didn't feel the same. And then Starfield drops. Played all the Souls games, Elden Ring is great, but I had similar feelings to Fallout 4 with ER and the DLC. It's great but how many times can I dodge roll counter against mostly reused/slightly modified assets?
"at this point you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with elden ring" Yes you're right I have worms in my brain so I am wondering that. Video far too smarty for me
I feel not pessimistic about the DLC but came out with the conclusion that this is indeed the answer to the question, “How much further can the souls formula increase the challenge formula before it stops being fun?” SOTE is the peak of the souls formula as it is today. I believe FROM knows this and I have faith in them. Myazaki said it himself he doesn’t really like doing sequels. So I have every bit of confidence they will try something new and innovative like. They have a great track record in this field so am, as always, interested in what they do next. EDIT: the Deflecting Hard Tear turned my Samurai build into Wolf from Sekiro. And the Striking Shields (particularly the magic one) is just divine. Peak Tear I agree. Oh and script weapons still suck😂
The lens you are viewing from is as you said your 1st exp w/ Souls but for us Vet players who have grown w/ the evolution of the games is an entirely different lens. There's an ole saying, "ignorance is bliss" I'm glad you are able to enjoy it but for a lot of us vets the combat is broken.
@@heyguyslolGAMING This is something I should have clarified in the video for sure. My perspective is very much that of a veteran and while I stand by it, I didn't fully consider how that might come across to the many fans that are just discovering the games for the first time through ER
Happy to say there’s plenty of previous games for you to play, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but unfortunately if your argument wouldn’t apply to a Call of Duty clone, it doesn’t apply here. I may never have played Pokemon, but that doesn’t excuse every new Pokemon game having the same gameplay as the previous one with little to no fundamental changes for the 38th time in a row. Any given kind of game may be a new experience for people who have never experienced the genre, but a huge number of players are not new to this anymore, and the existence of players not familiar with the combat doesn’t excuse a lack of development or creativity in a very old formula that, by many people’s assertion, is reaching its limits with regard to being able to design new encounters that both aren’t repeats of bosses that have been done before, and yet aren’t pushovers. In a game with base defensive mechanics limited to rolling, jumping and sprinting (even being kind and including guarding), each with very distinct timing and/or stamina limitations, this lack of development is starting to yield bosses that in the name of difficulty start to require, negate or remove all intuition from even the player tactics that used to be niche skill expression, such as positioning close to or behind bosses, strafing attack, or even poising through certain attacks to gain an extra attack on the boss; they do this by means of huge damage, inconsistent visuals of things like explosions, long and sometimes inescapable combos and huge health pools that make single mistakes over a long fight potentially deadly to inflate the difficulty of learning, ultratracking, insanely fast or comparatively unreactable moves or combos, disengages that jump the boss too far away for a counterattack, unnatural gotcha delays, incredibly precise roll timings, AOEs or chunky hitboxes on every hit, and sliding across arenas with standard attacks in the name of baiting out the all-powerful roll rather than giving even so much as a hint of what’s happening and what to do about it. If the only thing a boss can challenge is your memory and execution of a roll timing, and occasionally your roll direction and spacing, then if we don’t get at least an overhauled defensive system at this point, we’ll either run out of unique bosses, or fair ones, and neither eventuality seems all that fun to people who’ve played the last five-six games.
@@TheRedHood64i think you got tired of some things, and it's not games fault, it's normal to need different gameplay after a while. I don't know your content well sorry, but if you didn't you should try to randomize these games, to fully appreciate and vary the difficulty
How empty the world is never really bothered me because it made sense. If the lands between is a dying world, the land of shadow is a dead world thats been dead for a long time. It gave SotE this really ominous feeling like you werent supposed to see this place. Its hard to put the feeling in words but it gave a sense of "oh shit... some really bad stuff went on here". I get how you feel though cause I felt that way about both finger ruins and over all the rewards for exploration in the dlc were pretty bad.
In other souls games the worlds were dying yet they didnt feel as empty. I ngl thought the finger ruins were really cool, because they were clearly just a cool landscape that doesnt have much in it, like radahns arena. On the other hand if you explore a castle or something and find a cookbook or a talisman that lowers your hp to 3 but increases your arcane by 2.7 on a very rainy day while a half moon is out and you havent mowed your grass for a few weeks, it can understandably not be very great.
You want the real problem of elden rings is? The fact that is the only good open world out there. Why? Simple they are forcing themselves to fill everything to the brim, and thus we get a lot of empty space copy pasta, and with the hole thing bigger and more. We end up with lack of uniqueness. FromSoft excel in small projects compare to this open world shenanigans. It took them long, to do the base game and even longer to poop the dlc, while rush, cuz faking investors want there money returns now no later. The really base popular experience came from the small projects. Elden ring is a big successful flawed project because it allow new players to join, do to no just word of mouth, but for the fact that it had media boost, now we have players that mite not like previous or new soul'sborne because they will expect another elden ring asking for more rather than unique..., glad that the director said that this is the current last open world project from a while, so they be focus on smaller project. If they don't get Sony cock block that tiz.
Saying the base game did a good job filling its world is a bit... I find that rather kiddie-gloved and disingenuous in a way, considering the immense amount of recycling and the nearly copypaste nature of so many of the "attractions" scattered around the world. Limgrave, yeah, okay - but beyond Limgrave, the quality dropped hard.
The recycling in the base game wasn't that bad except for the snow areas which had almost no new unique enemies. It's more disappointing with the dlc cos they just reused base game enemies like dragons again.
These low-quality attack videos with low views are definitely not the general concensus around Elden Ring. The fact that this junk keeps showing up on my feed makes me wonder if these are just coordinated media attacks. There's a big world of AAA devs and social influencers that arent cool with companies like Fromsoft, and they do these kinds of things. Corporate warfare is real.
Ah yes, the classic ‘no one can criticise something I like, they must be paid by a mysterious corporation!’ Get a grip, people are allowed to have takes on its flaws, even if you don’t agree with them.
@@christopherlyndsay8611 while yeah the corporation thing is a reach and yeah that no one is above criticism, it rubs me the wrong way when a lot of these hour long videos try to pass of their opinions as objective. not saying they need to preface everything they say with "in my opinion" but maybe be less condescending to the devs (not like they'll ever watch these videos anyway) about problems in their games especially when some of the problems are the fault of the video essayist misunderstanding something.
@@kokomonkey7388 None of these vids claim to be objective. Most of them even say it's their opinions. You can criticise the game and the company's future directions. It's not like he was insulting them.
It is dated and clunky. Fromsoft is a one trick pony, and other studios are starting to produce similar games of better quality. Fromsoft is losing the race, because of their refusal to evolve. Elden Ring is Dark Souls 3 with a jump button. They are doing the same thing as Bethesda, and just reskinning the same game over and over, hoping nobody is paying enough attention.
people this dumb are why we have problems in the world, ignoring the fact that fromsoft made a crazy good Sci Fi robot level game. Sekiro, and the fact that Elden Ring is not just “dArK SoUls 3 wIth A jUmP bUttoN” but rather a fucking open world game with quintuple the amount of combat diversity
Comparing Fromsoftware with Bethesda is nonsensical. Bethesda's issue was not "stagnation", it's that their games lacked quality to begin with, the best Bethesda game wasn't even made by Bethesda. Fallout 4 was a massive downgrade compared to Fallout New Vegas in terms of story quality, role playing and RPG mechanics, so Bethesda games didn't just stagnate, they downgraded, because Bethesda couldn't do as good a job as Obsidian. This is not the case with Fromsoftware, they are the best at what they do, and continue to polishing the combat with each game, and all of them have their fair share of amazing bosses despite some misses, the problems you mentioned with some of the SOTE bosses are just a few of the misses (including overtuned difficulty), this is not an indication that there's no way to move forward with the combat.
If you can't see the comparison, then you're blind. NV wasn't even brought up yet the dickriders will always try to bring it up (when it's mediocre at best).
Anyone can see that From has hit the limits of what souls combat can achieve, but also, NO OTHER IP in all of gaming has the build variety and player expression that comes from souls games. Nothing even comes close. I see a of people in the comments talking about how the combat needs to evolve (devolve) into a faster paced, action oriented experience. I hope From never goes that route. I play these games to get away from stuff. Yes it has its place but pulling off a near infinite air combo on a fodder enemy gets boring REALLY quickly. From has definitely reached a crossroads with SOTE but I’m confident that the great minds over there can figure out a direction to take the combat system that’ll maintain the core principles and gameplay, while giving the player even more options.
I think the DLC was a oice of art, especially the map, my god thr density andintricacy of the physical world is brilliant. Can i somewhat agree that the formula is (deliberate choie of words) "every so slightly approaching stale" yes i could agree with that. But we all wanted some more ER and what rhey delivered with soe was fantastic. I believe with ER and the dlc they have taken the souls model to its Nth degree. I dont think we can argue that at this point. Their formula has spawned its own genre of games for gods sake. And they may well create a game that adapts or follows the skeleton of tjeir souls formula in future that reaches the same level of brilliance as the titles we know and love. However i believe ER and soe was Froms way of saying, its been good, heres our best and biggest attempt at the formula weve used fo many times... Now were gonna look at other styles of games
I liked shadow of the erdtree. A lot of the new weapons are super cool. I wasn't as stoked with the armors how ever there were a couple cool ones. The scadutree fragment system was a unique idea I didn't think anything was wrong with it. I think the biggest improvement was the more direct narrative. I wouldn't want the lore items and hints to go away but it would be nice to get a more direct mane story in these games. Also a quest log of some form or another as well some kind of indicator after you complete a dungeon. the last thing that from soft could fix are there menus I have always hated there menus and the pop up item notifications. As far as difficulty go's I can take it or leave it I don't really care either way unless it gets so difficult because there always trying to out do there last title that it's unplayable. But shadow of the erdtrer was pretty damn good I mean the size of it was incredible I thought it was going to be a quick in and out but boy was I wrong. Not everything needs to be a souls like game but if game companies learned anything from fromsoft it should be providing there customers with games that have the same attention to detail and provide them massive dlc with high quality content. Anyway that's my thoughts 🤔 definitely a good buy .
I don't think we need to worry about FromSoftware's future innovations in souls-like games. Through past titles like Bloodborne and Sekiro, they've clearly demonstrated the formulas and key elements of the genre while achieving their goals through different gaming experiences. The success of Elden Ring lies in its lack of restrictions on player experience; you could ask hundreds of people, and most would have different initial experiences. However, I believe this also highlights some weaknesses in the souls-like genre and paves the way for other studios to make significant strides in their own souls-like games. . . . In other words, let them cook!
What part of the lore is a mess? Also FromSoft lore especially in soulsborne genre is always disjointed you have to piece together 95% of it. I agree to your critique that the combat system has reached its limit they can of course make another game and include more QoL features like what Lies of P and make boss fights with larger enemies something more interesting than just hitting the legs or head.
Funny you point that out. His vid dropped right as I was in the middle of production on this. I had already written and recorded that intro by then but contemplated changing it for that exact reason. I ultimately decided it wasn't worth completely restructuring my intro just because another creator made a similar comparison. It's understandable how it may have come across that way, but I had no intentions of copying anyone. Maybe the comparison just isn't as unique as I thought it would be 🤷
@@TheRedHood64 Thanks for clarifying. If this is true would it be worth mentioning in the description or something? Stuff like that calls into question the critical/creative process of a video. Just an observation.
Idk man, it just seems like a very minor case of skill issue. Which is like fine, use summons magic or overpowered builds, nobody is gonna stop you but if you want to learn some of the best bosses ever conceived thn you have to give them time. I'm biased BTW and this DLC was specifically tailor made for me. Like it felt like Miyazaki came to my home, looked in my mind and thn made skibidi erdtree. It's just tht good. And if this is the kind of future from soft is visioning, I'm all for it. I don't care wht anyone else feels. It's for me god fukin damn it.
IMO the DLC made the base game unplayable for me. Every boss on the DLC including Rhadan was a fair boss. The dodges were intuitive and the weapon variety made everything good even better. In the base game we instead have fire giant rolling arround the entire arena and spamming projectiles, Godskin duo which is just a pain to fight, Maliketh being unpredictable af with multiple atks that look identical but have different followups, and mogh phase 2 flying arround the entire arena and stalling for bloodflame bleed procs. Mallenia is mostly fair but waterfowl is stll a bitch to dodge. Now to the DLC; Dancing lion: easy af to dodge, Rellana: phase 1 is a joke and phase 2 is phase 1 but with 3 more atks all of wich are free dodges, Furnace golems: Just stay between his legs, jump the stomps and run away from the jumps. Mesmer: His combo is a much easier version of waterfowl to dodge and he gives you arround 3 full seconds of end lag on it. Romina: Did anyone genuenly struggle with this one? Midra: Mogh phase 1 (the fun half) but even better. Skidootree Avatar: A dragon disguised as a tree. I switched to a longer weapon to get headshots easier. Even w/o that his absurd fire weakness makes him really easy and his ground atks can be jumped. Mitir: The adds die in 1 hit and her atks are really fun to dodge. Bayle: Did anyone dislike this fight? Orphan of Koz w a horse: Remember there is a jump button and the fight is trivial. You can read the atks that are coming from beind you by looking past the boss. Commander Gaius: Base game Rhadan but better in every way. Rhadan: I was expecting to struggle a lot cause everyone said he was too dificult and such so i optimized the f out of my build and he just died in 6 tries. Overall easier than the base game. My build was backhand blades w 40 Faith, 80 Dex.
I don't see the parallel between Bethesda and FromSoft. One has released 1 exceptional game (Morrowind) in between 3 good games (Daggerfall, Oblivion, Fallout 3) and then it only went downwards from there. The other has released 6 exceptional games (DS, DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, AC6) and 1 good one in between (DS2). And the Elden Ring DLC was wonderful. Yes, one day FromSoft will dissapear. But they got 100x more talent than Bethesda ever had.
Bethesda been running on morrowind hype for years. I finished oblivion but it was pretty lackluster. Skyrim was more of the same. I doubt I'll pick up the next one. I tried playing Skyrim a few years ago and it was just to similar to every other reskinned game they make.
What’s next? Hopefully not another trash open world. ER is the easiest game by far because YOU CAN BECOME GOD WHILE BARELY TOUCHING ANY BOSSES. I feel blind hearing people talk about these bosses. So many people playing with a post patch Scadu level of 15+ and turning the bosses into jokes, yet they still complain. Like *BOY!* you are fighting baby numbers, making the bosses hit you with pillows! This isn’t even the best DLC by Fromsoft. And now that Cross Slash is gone, somehow people went from making claims that Radahn was the peak of difficulty, to now calling him a joke. These people I mentioned are CLOWNS, because there are many MANY changes that are more important than Cross Slash. This community of Wanna Be tryhards just couldn’t understand the simple concept of positioning.
Cerulean Coast is one of the most pathetic levels of any game in the last decade. No excuse for that shit lol. Shaman Village isn't much better. The DLC is huge in terms of landmass but 35% of it is empty space. That and the final boss are the two biggest flaws of the DLC. I rate it an 8/10 but if not for those things it'd be a 10. Small focused games are better than large games full of empty space. The latter wastes your time.
You do realize he critiques the game as well as glaze it, right? In summary, he liked it, but he doesn't think it's peak. As someone who begs his friends to let him buy them From Soft games, I respect his opinion. And if you need to feel his opinion invaldated, he said he beat the DLC 4 times. That sh*t ain't easy.
Bro most of this boils down to one thing - You are burned out on these games. Elden Ring has only JUST brought Fromsoft and the souls gameplay loop to the mainstream. It's not anywhere near stale yet.
Why should he or I or anyone care what happens in the mainstream? I was disappointed in the game. That's all I care about. Hell I liked AC6 better, and even Lies of P. That's an off-brand knockoff product.
It's fine not to care. I do that too. But I don't keep consuming content about it and hang around with people who do. If you don't care you don't care. It could be burnout. It could be the game is bad. To you it doesn't matter, so you also don't have criticism to put up. You're explicitly not going there. But that means you hanging out here is pointless. Subjective bias matters when someone is trying to present critique. If a critic presents a whole rationale, when the reality is they just don't care and aren't engaging with the information. There is this no logical or real world connection to the observations and the whole thing becomes a waste of everyone's time, because there's no practical value to anyone but that critic. And the only meaningful action is to disengage. You can't blame something you already dislike in your gut for giving you bad experiences! And if you can't explain it beyond that, nobody is learning anything truthful about the game from you.
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS actually it's interesting that you mention Lies of P because I'm curious if competition from games like that will end up being good for Fromsoft overall. Lies of P is the first TRUE soulslike with such success and positive reception unless I'm forgetting something, and competition breeds creativity.
Yeah I absolutely disagree that FromSoft needs to change their combat system. This is a case of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it." Elden Ring is their most popular product by a long shot, why would you risk ruining that by drastically changing your combat system, simply for change sake? This is why games like Monster Hunter are special. Those devs stuck to their roots and just keep refining what they had, because it was great gameplay from the start. There was no need to drastically change that combat system. Same for souls/ER titles. Not saying that they should never put out anything but souls games, but changing the foundation of souls games when it's a tried and true formula would be very unwise to put it nicely. Also you said with the combat system being so old, it limits what FromSoft can do from enemy design standpoing. ...Have you seen the stuff we are fighting in Elden Ring? Lol they aren't limited at all when it comes to what enemies can do.
That's such a idiotic take like comparing apples and oranges, Bethesda has had ups and downs and their formula between skyrim fallout and now starfield haven't realy changed up, the difference with fromsoft is they have made 4 different series all with different playstyles, other than dark souls u can't say it's the same bloodborne is it's own thing, sekiro too, and elden ring is so much depth u could get lost and dozens of ways to play, your basically just saying ooh fromsoft has peaked now it's time to come down, the experience between game is widely varied that no one game feels the same, yet Bethesda games have the same overall gameplay other than the setting, game studios make garbage once in a while but this notion that it's stale is a hot take, fromsoft other than ds hasn't made a game that mirrors the other
"elden ring is so much depth u could get lost and dozens of ways to play" He's talking about the core mechanics that dictate how FS can design its bosses. All their souls bosses r designed around dodge rolling which clearly has reached its limits with this dlc.
I'm sorry but pre-nerf cross slash was still way better than waterfowl. I would rather have a 3rd of dmg than get one shot by a move with a sh1t telegraph. Plus she can do it as many times as she wants in each phase.
@@anonisnoone6125 nah, waterfowl is not as bad. she uses it 2-3 times per fight max, it gives you plenty of time to realise that she's doing it, and there are several ways to avoid it. you can avoid it by literally just running and jumping, then rolling through the rest, but if you can't do that you can use a shield to block it or use an ash of war like vow of the indomitable or BH step, the move gives you plenty of time to pull a shield or dagger out. it's also possible to literally just spam roll away from it if you're using light roll. but yeah, running and jumping is by far the best way and is also the intended way, it works every single time. the issue with cross slash is that if you knew how to dodge it, you would need to completely change your entire playstyle for the whole fight to accomodate for it, but if you know how to dodge waterfowl then the move might as well not exist because of how easily you can dodge it and how rarely she does it. waterfowl doesn't force you to change your playstyle if you know at least one of the 5+ methods to dodge it.
@@ramen3643 She's not limited to doing it 2-3 times at all. I don't know where u got that info from. Some people have even said she's done it up to 5 times in 1 phase and sometimes can do it back to back. "you can avoid it by literally just running and jumping" This is what I do. The problem arises when I'm in an animation and then she decides to give me a "fuck you" and gives me no time to run away, especially if I'm using a greatsword or colossal weapon. I hate that she heals on shields. It's just a big fuck you to the players who play like that and who actually want to progress through the fight rather than having to delete half her hp again. Waterfowl forces you to play the passive which is the problem. The whole fight is literally built around expecting this 1 move which makes it less fun, same with cross slash. And sometimes if she's literally just standing there and you decide to finally do something, she can pull it out. And it's even worse in phase 2 cos she's as aggressive as dlc bosses and constantly chases u. Add to the fact that her wings make it hard to tell if she's actually starting waterfowl or not cos she jumps around a lot. It's a shame cos all her other moves r actually fun to dodge, except maybe the clones, but even those I'm fine with cos they at least have decent timings.
@anonisnoone6125 I should've been more specific but didn't mean it was limited to 2-3 times, that's just the average, she rarely does it more than 3 times, phase 1 goes down pretty quick so she usually only gets to do it once, she also rarely does it in phase 2 since she has so many other moves she can cycle between, so she will likely only do it once there as well, but the phase lasts longer so you could get her to do a 2nd one depending on your RNG. also idk what tf you're doing, but I no hit her using a collosal weapon and I could always dodge it even when I was recovering from a charged R2, the only reason she would catch you with it is if you were R1 spamming and hit her after she already started the attack.
as a blanket statement: i'm *siiiick and tired* of from soft's same engine and player character from 2011. i mean if you really think about it, elden ring is a 2016 game with 2022 world and enemies. the player character is so incredibly boring, weak, and nothing is ever balanced around anything more than R1 dodge R1 dodge monster hunter games have really made me notice how samey, one note, and overall basic their combat is in elden ring. ALL the enemies do is spew out attacks. it isn't dynamic, it doesn't actually change anything when a new phase is hit, it's another set of animations to constantly puke on the player. it is a dodge button simulator the DLC is really where my issues came out. i've always had a bit of an issue with ER because of multiple things but until the DLC i called it one of the best games ever. well, the DLC has shown me that as good as they are, there are some seriously outdated and *shit* things they refuse to learn from. quests are the perfect example. no one actually likes googling 17 times just to know where to go. and not to mention the fact that every. single. NPC. just betrays you. that is the only fucking thing these guys write about. betrayal. ooooo boy wonder whats nex- betrayal. okay how about thi- griffith. alriiight well maybe the next one will b- another betrayal. like okay man, i genuinely do not give a fuck about the regurgitated storytelling anymore. skip through that damn dialogue ASAP lol. useless content at this point. they are like ubisoft with their storytelling. doing the same exact *damn* thing over and over and over and over which wraps right back around to it's combat. they all just feel like lines of code at this point please don't get comfortable from soft. you guys *ARE* fallable. the cracks were hard to see with sekiro, bloodborne, DS3 but with elden ring it's like i'm walking over them lastly, this DLC just makes me assume they care much more about disrespecting the player and making sure they fail 45 times so they can go 'aw gee pops what a hard boss!' when in reality the player is just trudging through the loads and loads of bullshit thrown their way and we got...a dodge! an R1! a jumping R2! and now, a whole 5 minutes of deflecting cause we didn't wanna balance the DLC around a deflecting talisman! :0 p.s. CDPR was just being nice
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
FINAL BOSS UPDATE: As of patch 1.14, Radahn's cross slash can now be dodged normally, the VFX in phase 2 are much clearer, and his recovery frames on some moves are a lot more generous. Is he easier? Sure. But he's also way more fun to fight. This is what he should have been at launch.
I don't really know what to say to that, because I think the damage is already done. Fuck knows that Radahn isn't the only boss I have issues with, and I'm not going back to the game just because they fixed him, if even you can call him fixed. One thing's for sure tho, FromSoft isn't getting any of my money anymore, they're going in a direction where I don't wanna play their games anymore
I don't see what's fun about responding to every single move with the exact same button press.
@@ennayanne could you explain this?
@@ennayanne alot of moves are strafeable, and if you want more depth try using the deflecting hardtear.
@@Raidon484 people like you get on my fucking nerves, this is the only game they have made which made you feel this way, why are you instantly assuming all of their future games will be like this?
the game they made before elden ring was sekiro, whicu pretty much unanimously praised, and then qfter elden ring they made amored core 6 which you seen to have forgotten about or just haven't played for whatever reason.
fromsoft have already said that they prefer making new experiences and new IP rather than sequels, and that they don't plan to make any more open world games in the near future.
if elden ring wasn't for you, their next game could still be one that is.
fromsoft also has multiple directors working on different games, miyazaki is no longer the only one leading the projects, and if that has you worried then keep in mind that sekiro and AC6 did not have very much input from miyazaki yet ended up great.
basically my point is that fromsoft will continue making unique games with unique combat systems etc. the soulsborne franchise is pretty much over now with elden ring which was basically the last hurrah of the series which combined everything they have accumulated from past games and put it into a new open world environment, I'm sure fromsoft also knows that the souls style of game cannot go much further than this.
TL;DR be patient and wait to see their next game before you say this.
The problem, to make it short, is that they want to make a dmc game instead of sticking to the fundamentals of souls combat.
We truly do have reached the limit and instead of polishing what's there fromsoftware wants to one up themselves.
They desperately need to make other type of games and give this formula a break, specially seeing how rapidly soul-likes are catching up in terms of quality
There is only so many times you can make a melee-based rpg with the player character being 1/8th the height of every boss chipping away at enemy’s 2000000000 hp in a world where the gods of old have long fallen from their glory days before it get really old
I think most problems people have with souls games come from the fact that only one studio consistently makes good soulslikes but they’re not perfect so they’ll make mistakes too. Thematic changes on top of combat changes change an experience so much but fromsoft couldn’t possibly explore all the potential they created on top of having poor decisions sometimes. Don’t lose hope in soulslikes as a genre, lose hope in fromsoft and then play Lies of P🙏
@ people said the exact same thing about Rockstar when it came to open world titles ten years ago
Some players are still having fun. For me im still in my first playthrough just putting my summon sign to help others :3 elden ring is such a good game❤
I don't understand why movement Ashes of War have to go on weapons and even if it has to be on a weapon, they replace your L2 instead of replacing your dodge button, making you able to have it on something in your offhand. Hell, I don't see why a movement AoW can't be put on Armor to replace your dodge.
Really over exaggerated but nonetheless there’s still plenty people still playing constantly an itching for more. So no, your wrong
I played DS2 for the first time after beating SoTE.
I like it so much more than Elden Ring
Average ds2 enjoyer: 🗿
But I disagree, Elden ring is my favorite in the series but ds2 still my second
DS2 and Elden Ring are probably my two favorites, but there's more I hate about Elden Ring. Actually, that's not entirely true, but most of the things I dislike in DS2 are optional.
Let me guess - Frigid Outskirts?
I'm still unsure how I feel about Elden ring, but what I am sure of is that were a lot of areas in it that felt as poorly designed as frigid outskirts (and the worst thing is that I saw the potential of Frigid outskirts and felt that it needed only a few changes to be one of the most interesting experiences in the game... As with Elden ring, the areas that gave me such not fun experiences felt like developers sabotaging their own designs - what I mean by that is that areas like Crumbling Azula and Haligtree looked very cool and interesting, but had too many too annoying enemies, ambushes, ganks, poorly balanced enemies, the most annoying dragons ever... They could've been good if they didn't have so much unnecessary stuff
I also think that with Elden Ring, and especially with Shadow of the Erdtree, Fromsoft has hit the limit of how complex they can make the bosses within the Souls dodge-focused combat system. This is their 5th game with that combat and I think it’s time they move on to a more Sekiro-type combat and innovate on that system as it has a huge potential for crazy anime bosses with never ending combos because it doesn’t require the enemies to have long openings for the player to attack. In Sekiro, defense is the best offense and they can go all out on Inner Father-like bosses and it could be insanely fun. Some of the modded bosses like Ultimate Isshin are amazing and it’d be a shame if From didn’t innovate on such an incredible combat system.
wut.... The whole appeal of Souls games was they AREN'T crazy anime. If Fromsoft moves towards a more Devil May Cry cringe fest they will lose what makes them unique and appealing to non-weebs
I think you mean offense is the best defense?
@MrNewRevolutionary Well, the thing is, most of the dlc bosses have become crazy over the top anime types. Its like trying to take down fighter jets with a pistol. And when you use the boss weapons and spells. they are a MASSIVE downgrade from the boss version. Some are outright trash. My fav weapon is Rellana's twin blades but you compare it to when she uses and man. She can keep them imbued. have all sorts of cool effects and attack chain and so on. And then you try it and can do only 2 of all the flashy moves, hit less hard etc. The bosses and enemies have evolved but the player character is still same old darksouls wimp who can't die. While it doesn't have go sekiro route, the combat definitely needs a touch up.
@@JasonMC-wc1jr But... that's always been the core allure of dark souls? Go play prototype or something similar if you want a power fantasy?
@MrNewRevolutionary You missed my point. If the game played like traditional darksouls, that would be fine, but it doesn't. The combat stays the same while the bosses get more and more crazy. It feels like playing against bloodborn or sekiro bosses, but without the combat of either. It doesn't need to be a power fantasy, but it does need an upgrade... or go back to being like it used to be.
Really good video dude. I'm glad you brought up the topic of exploration and navigation becoming easier over time with each iteration, and how that inevitably affects the boss design and the pressure the developers feel to live up to their reputation of difficulty, its something I feel most people tend to not think about. As someone who always appreciated the level and encounter design, story telling, atmosphere and art direction over the combat itself in these games, it saddens me to see more and more of this obsessive fixation on boss fights, both from the community and fromsoft themselves. At the expense of almost everything else this series used to do so well.
I think I feel more positively about this DLC than you, but your critiques are valid and echo many of my own, and you give the devil his due and acknowledge the things you liked about this DLC in a fair way.
Part of what keeps me from being too pessimistic about Fromsoft's future output is that they put out Armored Core 6 in between Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree. That fact is easy to forget for people like us who mostly like the Souls formula, but it is a monumental feat. I never cared about Armored Core previously, only tuning in to From's work in the era Demon's Souls kicked off. But AC6 ended up as my GOTY 2023, when I thought Baldur's Gate 3 had already settled that issue earlier in the year.
This is the studio that followed up Dark Souls 2 with Bloodborne, and followed up Dark Souls 3 with Sekiro. From has creative juice to spare, and has proven they're willing to try new things, even if they've just iterated on something familiar.
I really appreciate your style. This is a wonderfully level-headed video in a field crowded with sensationalism and overstatement. I'm happy to be your 2nd dozenth subscriber. In on the ground floor before that counter hits the dozens of thousands. Keep it up sir.
I loved AC6 probably should have mentioned it as another reason why I'm not overly pessimistic about the future. I hope to see more projects like AC6 for sure
It should be noted that Miyazaki said the narrative and base of Shadow of The Erdtree was already established before the DLC by him and GRRM. And I disagree with the story being the same as it always has, primarily because of the NPC’s and nature of the narrative’s unfolding. More so than the base game, character motivations, actions and the plot are much more clear on top of each character having their own divergent quest lines that eventually intersect. People don’t like the gank fight but in terms of narrative, it’s the most important moment aside from the ending. All of these characters interacting with, conversing with and going to war for different reasons. It makes the plot emergent in a way no other game prior has. You’re not just a person wandering into a conflict that’s happened, you’re in the epicenter
Maybe AC6 development is the very reason that SOTE has so many signs of lacking polish, like empty worlds, poor technical performance and unbalanced gameplay, all things that should be caught by any decent playtesting team. They either lacked proper and timely testing or the development resources to address issues before release.
See, I don't quite know whether or not to agree with the creativity thing.
On one hand, areas are stunning as always, the visuals are by no means anything to scoff at.
On the other hand, there are parts of the experience that make me feel like they're running out of ideas: moves or entire bosses copied from previous games with basically a new coat of paint are one thing. Then there's the constant reuse of shit. Everywhere and anywhere you go, even in the dlc they couldn't refrain from reusing bosses. Was the fallingstar beast and the 4 ulcerated tree spirits necessary or are they just padding? Romina is Quelaag adjacent enemy Nr. 573 in my opinion. But it really comes through with the final boss: first off all, Radahn again. No matter what you do, it's Radahn again. Then he's basically also Lorian and Lothric but Lorian isn't paraplegic. And the way in which you access the final cutscene reminds me strongly of Bloodborne's dlc. The swords you get as a reward are the same sword twice and it took me someone shoving me into it face first to notice the fucking difference between these swords and the base game Radahn sword. The fact that Mohg is the vessel for Radahn is honored by one move and and some horns growing out of him. And the final cutscene tells you a conclusion all the rest of the dlc's story worked like hell to make you stumble over, meaning working to find this out on your own was wasted time, except maybe the darkness in the cutscene is there so some theory crafters can speculate on the implications this has on Radahn missing a testicle (sorry, had to vent that one). The interconnectivity with the base game is nada, zilch, zero, something we had in every other game and was prime real estate in this one. The remembrance bosses feel really out of place in a way that's hard to describe... Fucking hell, Gaius' weapon is a regular smithing stone weapon! There is zero reason for that other than someone forgetting to change it after he was made a remembrance boss as padding. There is a second dancing lion. They learned fucking nothing from people's reaction to Astel and Godefroy.
This doesn't scream creativity to me. The only thing really creative here seem to be the visuals. That's about it. The combat system seems to largely be the same as DS, maybe a bit further evolved but if changing the formula of a years old game the slightest counts as creativity I don't know what doesn't. Hell, I'd argue any day that the combat got worse, so what do I know. But everything else screams "running out of ideas" straight into my face with a megaphone.
@@TheRedHood64 how about say thank you for that persons subscription you clown 🤡
Building on parry-based Sekiro combat is one obvious direction they could take, and I would welcome it. But I think a much more important step would be to either remove s completely or restrict them to more sporadically used special moves. Like you point out in the video, the s-based dodges often feel downright silly and I also have the suspicion that they're a big reason for the arms race FS is in with boss fights. Think of how many of the more annoying habits of ER's bosses are a direct response to roll-spamming. So I think getting rid of the incentive for that entirely could be a great first step to evolve the formula.
have you played armored core 6? that game has 0 I frames, you just get a quickboost dodge that helps you reposition around attacks, and the only "I frames" you can get are from a plasma shield you have yo equip (which I have never used) and some limited use super moves that put a forcefield around your mech that lasts about 5 seconds. it's exactly what you're looking for.
@@ramen3643 I love that game, have played it to death, currently going through older AC games while waiting for a DLC or sequel. I didn't mention it, but it was one of the games that made me notice the problem with i frames.
@@ksw8514 alot of souls players complained that there were no I frames lol, it was pretty funny
Honestly, if that’s the case they should just ditch the souls like stuff and make something like Sekiro or make a Sekiro 2
@@darymanzueta8875 no they should just make something completely new
The souls combat system just needs more sekiro style parrying, bloodborne style dodging and more group fights/ battle scenes. The deflecting hardtear is a step in the right direction but the visual feedback isn't as satisfying as sekiro's where you truly believe your watching an epic sword fight. The combat system going forward needs the aesthetic focus sekiro and bloodborne's combat systems had. We have to "believe" whats going on, on screen. More fights with multiple allies vs multiple enemies would be cool too.
Honestly, I kind of hate the hardtear. It turns any discussion about challenge or game/build advice into “just use this completely game changing tear” and kills it.
both sekiro parrying and bb dodging already exist in ER through a physick and weapon art. Group fight wouldnt be that great considering the npc gank fight at the end of SOTE
@@Scowleasy
I don't think it does. It's simply another option that still requires skill to master to change the flow of defensive combat from Dodge/Parry/Block. It's really the midpoint of Bloodborne's Guns (safe and easy parries for high intensity, reckless aggression) and Sekiro's Deflections (the center of fast, violent, thoughtful combat).
No, the combat doesn't need Sekiro deflecting. The hardtear is more than enough.
no, no more dodging. I liked blocking in Dark Souls, I've had enough of Bloodborne, i don';t want it infecting my entertainment.
I just want to say that this might be the best review on SOTE that I have watched. Your criticisms were very fair and you articulated them well. It’s quite rare to see in these long videos.
Skyrim name drop with fallout gameplay
Well done?
It’s not his fault, Skyrim hasn’t been released on enough platforms to make it easily accessible.
@@BitterSteel69LMAO
Do they have it out for my toaster yet?
Same engine, same gameplay loop, same quest structure, same…everything basically. Oh, there’s guns in Fallout so yeah, I guess it is a completely different game.
I like the more critical approach to from software I feel like a lot off the time ppl dismissed the problems with these games too quickly I would even say they your criticism was a bit soft at times but I share your sentiment for the most part the combat need more
Oh people definitely are defending and giving from way too much credit with elden ring in some areas. This game already has the biggest number of analysis where everything is a mixed bag. The only other title that surpass elden ring here is dark souls 2 for obvious reasons.
There are 3 main reasons for this : the horrible state of the industry, the fault of the gamers with how weird they are, and bias of comfort they tend to have with certain things or developers.
Really good video, all your points are well articulated, and you didn't sit on a point for too long; you made your point and moved on to the next segment. Keep it up, I'm glad i found your channel.
One thing that struck me while watching this video is one big difference betweenn the flask upgrades in the base game (sacred tears and golden seeds) and the Scadutree Fragments.
The flask upgrades are inherently "lose-less" upgrades, they help you survive longer in fights, and thus die fewer times, both against bosses and the environment.
The Scadutree blessing affecting your damage output as well as your core survivability (how many hits you can take at once rather than over time) makes them lean more strongly towards "win-more".
Thus when you upgrade your flask it lets you make more mistakes. When you upgrade the Scadutree blessing it makes the fight shorter but with largely the same room for error.
Your video completly explains why every attempt to fix elden ring felt like a bandaid instead of an actual solution. It also explains why i end up wanting to play sekiro instead 😂.
Amazing review.
I'm still slightly conflicted if I should buy it, since I had quite a bit of problems with the base game(still haven't completed it and am currently attempting to learn Malenia's fight), namely the boss fights(there were only few ones that I truly found fun so far), some levels having too much and too annoying types of enemies, exploration being hit or miss, dragon and wyrm fights(actually most big enemies in general)... I have a lot of problems with it, but I did love some parts of it, like Leyndell, the royal capital, overall art direction, some NPCs ...
I don't know, I'm still conflicted....
I love Elden ring, I hate shadow of the erdtree, I put so many hours into the base game on ps5, played sote on ps5, just got a pc, wanted to get Elden ring on pc, but sote left such a sour taste in my mouth that I’m constantly debating whether or not to get the pc version. I beat sote once before any patches, haven’t been back since
I agree, mah g.
fromsoftware needs to Refine itself further, not Bloat itself.
A fair and eloquent critique. For me, SotE was incredible in many ways but it also doubled down on so many of the issues I had with Elden Ring in general. After being blown away by Sekiro It was disappointing to learn that Fromsoft would follow up with a super XL expanded version of the exact same type of game that Dark Souls 3 capped off perfectly in The Ringed City.
The DLC’s main quest being told through missable npc side quests was certainly a choice
You aren’t supposed to find and figure out every single little thing in your first play through. It’s never been that, and will never be that.
@@hhowdy imagine if Oscar in ds1 was missable lmao
@@Scowleasy Pretty terrible example tbh. Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring are the exact same in how the Estus/ Healing flask is given to the player. Fromsoft would never put a key component to the gameplay of a video game behind a missable or optional quest, that’s absolutely absurd to even think to argue. That’s like saying if dodging or moving was locked behind some obscure quest. No fundamental part of the gameplay will ever be put as a quest reward, never has and never will. Think before you speak please.
I don't think that they meant you could simply miss getting your estus, I think it was more about Oscar as a character, but while it would feel very weird not meeting any NPCs until firelink and not hearing what Oscar has to say, doesn't narrator tell the exact same thing as Oscar? So what I'm trying to say, Oscar isn't essential to the story, but the Asylum would feel emptier/less meaningful without him. So... What was I trying to say?
I agree with all of your points. This was the first From DLC that didn't surpass the main game for me.
I have faith that they will continue to improve though, and I look forward to the next release.
6:55 You have to dodge a billion+ times to make any build work. Thats the problem with this new design. Its not fun. Sometimes Im mid fight and just stop dodging like F it Ima vibe to this death and then lose all my souls and give 0 fux. Thats the DLC.
Shadow of the erdtree was definitely an additional experiment as was the base game eldenring. The dlc was very vertical in the map layout, working out how to make future maps feel truly 3D. It reminded me of a metroid style game
I don't think it worked at all. Super Metroid is tiny compared to SotE with its giant open fields and wide corridors to pour over, and in that vastness are hidden incredibly miniscule details you can miss which are the only way to unlock entire regions of the map. One of course is the hidden wall leading down to the abyss woods. I don't think it's good to mix this kind of huge vastness with tiny details. Do I have to inspect every single rock? Look at every bit of rubble from every single angle? Do I have to walk towards every single dead end and look off every cliff? The vertical map creates kind of a fake open world where you can't really get anywhere other than the field you're currently in. And with these tiny little details like needles in haystacks, that just happen to lead to something important like a huge new area or fragments, how do the giant open areas fit and why are they necessary? They're just a bunch of emptiness and cliffs taunting you as you try to figure out how to get down there or how to find the item you need. They should have just stuck with the tight, devious dungeons they have been so good at.
I'm a big fan of this game and the DLC but I must say, the fact that all the weapons are in "categories" and there are no unique weapon animations really really REALLY bugs me
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS Super Metroid is 30 years old, too, but its genre is still highly influential. I do agree this wasn't the best way to tackle it. It still feels that eldenring and SotE was one big test in figuring out how to merge a vertical labyrinth (SotE) and an open world environment (base game)for future game development. I'm curious what takeaway notes Fromsoft gathered in what was considered successful/failure and potential methods in tackling such moving forward.
@@briggy4359 So you'd rather just have less weapons because that's what will happen???? They clearly design moves/animations that make sense for each weapon type. There's only so many of those so... you just want less of each weapon type?
Or y'know, like Dark Souls 1's map....
I love that we had such similar takes on the DLC! I really enjoyed most bosses but found the visuals or over-aggression overwhelming at times. I'm interested to go back to Radahn after the VFX updates to see if I can actually tell what's going on now. I do wish Romina and Putrescent Knight were a little more difficult since I really loved their movesets and design, but overall the most fun experiences for me were Rellana, Midra, and Bayle.
One thing I actually took issue with was the fact that most roads leading out of the main area that you start in go through the Shadow Keep, but there's nothing (at least to me) indicating that Messmer himself is intended for late DLC scaling. I wish there was some sort of seal locking Messmer's door that you have to find the key to so that you're still encouraged to explore through Shadow Keep early on and venture into the other areas of the map without wandering into Messmer's arena and banging your head against the wall like I did thinking he was just intended to really be That Hard. I think I'd have loved the boss so much more if I'd fought him when I was a more intended level, but placing him somewhere that you have to explore to get literally anywhere else made him seem more to me like he filled the sort of Godrick position of the DLC.
Otherwise I had such mirrored opinions to a lot of what you said. Most areas were visually stunning to the point that I had to sit and take it in when I got to a new place but then actually roaming around the areas felt like I was searching for something to do with a magnifying glass. It felt like lots of empty time.
I'll definitely be interested to see how they adapt in future soulslike titles, especially with actual competition like Lies of P coming out and sort of using their own formula but doing it better in a lot of ways. I think they've hit the same point as Pokemon where they've pushed their original formula so far that they have almost no choice but to try and overhaul some things for better or worse if they want to stay fresh. I remember being new to the series with Elden Ring and being absolutely baffled when I realized that you could dodge THROUGH fire giant's massive shield with i-frames, it's getting the the point where the bigger and crazier the bosses get, the more it just feels like it doesn't make sense to play which I think makes those fights less engaging overall. Playing Shadow of the Erdtree after games like Lies of P, Sekiro, and Stellar Blade definitely made me realize how much tighter and more specialized combat can be when not everything is about an i-frame.
I'm normally not one to comment on UA-cam videos, but although I do have some disagreements, but the main thesis about From stretching the simplistic combat to its limits while being stagnated is spot on. I'm glad this pretty good video critique dropped on my feed despite being late butttt eh, so here's to the algorithm. o7
I'm glad to see more thoughtful criticism, especially from someone like you who still enjoys the more standard bosses but can still see the issues without being insufferable. As someone who used to be big on sl1/bl4 and mastering bosses, after Elden Ring and especially SOTE, I just can't be bother to do so anymore. There's still bosses that I like and can no-hit with no issues, Maliketh, Placidusax, Starscourge Radahn, Bayle (if the camera and fire breath behaves), and Mogh as examples.
It's just getting tiring, and I just hope Fromsoft either tones it back and introduces new ideas and other forms of difficulty that aren't artificial/exclusive to bosses and enemies (like making levels challenging again, i.e., Blighttown, Lateria, Sen's Fortress). Or as said here, just go and make a proper action game if they just want to double down. I have some issues with Sekrio, but I wouldn't mind if they expanded on the combat and world. Hell, I'll take that over an Elden Ring 2 where it'll likely be the same experience, but now even more artificial difficulty and more reused assists with bland level design with overly generous checkpoints and basic enemy encounters that either basically a mini-boss, ambushes the player in the corner or a gank.
Personally, I think the biggest issue with the soul games is that are becoming more and more predictable, and to me, at least is becoming boring. It's likely where people (particularly vets like myself) are starting to become fatigued. It's been a while since I've played SOTE, and for the first time for a soul game, I don't want to replay it. I tried but ultimately just couldn't. It mostly comes down with the frustrations of skibbiscat fragments, the level design for me personally being mostly bland or rehashes of ideas I've seen before in previous in the titles that I've played to death with the same combat since Demon's Soul's. The verticality is nice but it doesn't flow well for me at least compared to DS1 or Bloodborne. Doesn't help that most of the bosses are mediocre/ repeats from the base game. I do still go through base game from time to time as it's much easier to get through the bland stuff (Leyndell, Stormviel and Farum are soild levels so that helps).
I just want to be surprised again with the cool and weird moments of this series rather than the current focus on just pretty vistas and the bosses, who are just becoming rehashes of previous fights from the past games but with more visual clutter and janky movesets designed solely for the reputation of difficulty. As much as I find enjoyment in bosses like Maliketh and Bayle, they are just supercharged versions of Artorias and Midir, respectively. That goes without saying Rellena is just reuses the same themes as Pontiff, Romina is just another variant visually as Qualaag and Nástka. Hell Messmer, although good overall, has the same themes of Rykard (who is a rehash of the Storm King and Yhorm) but now a standard humanoid boss (i.e, snakes, fire, sin).
The lore is a mess coming from a lore nerd. I did enjoy ER's lore, not my favorite but it was also not full of plot holes like Bloodborne's Executors and Bloodviles conflict or DS2's and especially DS3's lore. Too bad the DLC decided to fuck it up, mostly with Miquella and Radahn as Radahn's story was complete and needed no expansion. My boy Messmer got shafted, he deserves better. Don't get me started on how dumb DLC Miquella's plan is.
It's just hard to be optimistic as I have seen this same situation happen to other once beloved franchises/companies. They see their golden goose and start playing it too safe, too predictable, and ultimately, too boring. Hopefully I get proven wrong.
Subbed mate, I hope you get the recognition you deserve, actual opinions without either rose tinted glasses or corporate interests are rarer than you think this platform these days!
I think all your arguments are on point here. I think FS pushed the limits of their combat system to the point of breaking and the only ppl who disagree are the ashes of cheese users and non-vet souls players.
ER is a good game but its not a GREAT game sadly bc it really lacks replay ability that the past games still have. For those making the argument that it does are just wanting some sort of target to beat up on w/ ease bc each time you play thru the game gets easier and limiting your build really starts to show the flaws in the design and why it looses replay ability.
I'm also very concerned for FromSoftware's future to the point where I will not be pre-ordering their next title bc I want to make sure its not going to be a further extension of what ER is bc if so its going to be a hard pass for me and this is coming from a guy who has 2000+ hrs combine of all Soul's game except DS2 as I've never played it.
At this point my fav's of the series is DS3 & BB. DS1 is also up there but due to my evolution as a player its hard to get challenge out of that game now even as an SL1 run but it's def one of my favs especially w/ the best world design I've experienced.
"Ashes of cheese"
Ain't no way. You're really trying to say one of the game's main combat mechanics is "cheese"?
@@JF-vz1ju
That’s What You Call An Elitist Attitude.
Walking echo chamber. Please make up your own opinion.
I agree that with companies like Bethesda and Ubi, they stagnated after they released their respective peaks. but I feel like it also has to do with the fact that at the time, up and coming games like Dark Souls were released that shook things up and made their game design look stale in comparison. FS is in a unique position bcs I feel like no other AAA company can give Fromsoft adequate competition where they should really feel that pressured, especially in the open world genre. Some might argue Wukong as a contender but despite being really good, I don’t think that game is really that innovative in terms of showing us things we haven’t seen before, and I also don’t think that game would do quite as well if it wasn’t for its homebase Chinese audience (since most of them get firewalled from playing foreign releases). All of this to say I still don’t think From should feel complacent tho, all it takes is one amazing game to reduce them to a has-been.
Lies of P was damn good, Crimson Desert and Witcher 4 should be amazing as well next year.
17:01 There’s 3 total scadutree fragments in abyssal woods if that means anything lol
I've watched a alot of critiques and this was by far the best. You balanced your personal taste against the more general palate in a way that tied purely logistical problems with the more thematic/abstract ones. If you wanted something constructive I'd say having a simple concise question (one one that gets at the overarching themes of the problems) to call back to and hammer home is nice particularly in a long video like this. I sure a shit produce a critique like this or what I suggested though. Keen to see your next vid
Everything is just starting to feel stale and worn out wouldn't doubt the devs feel the same.
Holy shit only 600 views! My man, you are underrated. Im sharing.
I think for a next game they should push their expanded playerbase more in the direction of sekiro/bloodborne playstyle. Its the only way that the same combat system will still feel fresh and rewarding enough. From artorias, fume knight, penetrator, owl (2nd), maria, and now rellana, the fast paced humanoid dances will never ever tire me out.
This is actually a good critique. Most critiques are ragebaiting about bosses having long combos and no opening and complaining that they actually have to learn the boss(which was the same in every other souls game btw) and saying nothing positive in return. But thankfully this was actually a very well put together video, keep up the work
Fromsoft needs to make smaller games or break up their projects into multiple expansions and eliminate all repetition and filler. Make the open areas smaller with more concentration, make fewer but longer and more complex minor dungeons and make larger legacy dungeons.
They also need to really focus on balancing the combat and create more depth and complexity for the combat. There needs to be fewer weapons with each being unique with varied, complex movesets. Especially boss and legendary weapons.
They also need to nerf rolling and make positioning, blocking, deflecting and parrying more effective.
Spell casting needs an overhaul. You should be able to assign spells to different buttons and have a spell wheel. Spells should also do the most damage point blank and do less damage the further away you are. Magic should also regenerate like stamina.
They should also make classes more distinct so that your choice of class actually matters and influences play style.
They should also add the quick dodge and rally from Bloodborne. The rally system was the best innovation Fromsoft ever made along with Sekiro's deflect and parry system. Rally makes getting hit way more lenient and offers another mechanic for combat.
They need to make fewer bosses, properly tune them for the player combat and not repeat main bosses.
You know its almost somewhat fitting really on how absurd the combat has gotten.
Like at DLC's end you are facing down a frankenstien's monster abomination of a demigod and a god who has achieved the peak of his strength.
An idea that in previous souls games would have been considered insane. Most gods and monsters are narritively depowered but here its like the kid gloves are off. A final exam that is not holding back. On a hype perspecitve it makes me look back on the journey fromsoft went through as a whole but it does also concern me on what they could posiibly do in the future to keep up with the arms race.
‘Absurd’ and then it’s just them asking you to jump instead of rollspamming. Souls vets are such pathetic people
@@Stanzbey69 Now hold your horses. I'm not saying that this design is bad. I'm not one of those git gud types. I'm just saying that it has gotten more complex, a complexity I like actually.
I'm actually kind of disappointed in the Radahn nerf a little bit because it kinda loses the narrative punching power a bit.
I loved going into the fight with a variety of builds. Making builds is my favorite part of the game to be honest. Be it magic, melee, bleed, hell summons are gonna be fun too when i get around to it. Mostly because the deck was stacked against you very purposefully. You are supposed to use every trick in the book to beat this monster and it's a mindset that I love using when going back to older titles and using new strategies there. Elden ring has taught me skill is great, but using your brain is better.
@@TheUltimateMachineGod oh my bad, thought u were one of those ‘hi guys, souls vet here, the game sucks because it isn’t jank slop like ds1’. Glad it was just a misunderstanding. These critique vids have melted my brain with their horrible takes.
@@Stanzbey69 hey as nostalgic at ds1 really is I admit there are some things in that game that age poorly. It will still be a classic in my heart though. Hell honestly makes me envy not having an actual jump would've made bed of chaos a bit more tolerable too tbh.
@@Stanzbey69 Bruh you're just hating because those games were made precisely with their limited resources. It can feel kinda janky but atleast the game is made to match your limited movement. In elden ring it really doesnt make any sense when you're fighting gods at their peak. Everyone moves and attacks like they're at their peak, which is just nearly impossible to fight against.
Also jumping works rarely and most of the time rolling works just as well. I swear yall have a humiliation kink or something. Every single person repeats the: "Miyazaki really showed us what his games are about haha!" slogan like you're in a cult or something. Yall cant comprehend a boss (that isnt clearly gimmicky and just bad like bed of chaos or something) that is insanely hard could be designed poorly.
Bosses should have clear telegraphs and not stuff like rellana, in all of her attacks she pauses, swings again, pauses, swings again, pauses, roll catch, and then pauses, and then suddenly stops combo. I know you're a god in gaming and you can find obnoxious stuff like that fun to learn, but even an above average player will just have to resort to atleast semi op stuff to just get it over with. I got like 300 hours in elden ring and i try to explore everything in the game, i like the scadutree fragments, but saying "oh just go explore if its too hard for you!" really doesnt do anything, because it doesnt fix the fact that the attacks are way too hard and really not fun to learn.
I think the sales will bear out the strategy of combining RPG with this 10 year old combat system. Sekiro sales were smaller in comparison- the best-selling Souls copies recently show that this now familiar structure is a huge market to tap for many years à la GTA.
I think what sucks to me about the scadutree fragments/revered spirit ashes, and the exploration being generally unrewarding in terms of item rewards, is that it could have been easily fixed imo. The level for scadutree blessings and spirit upgrades should have been raised, even if it meant less immediately noticeable change in your damage/resistances per level. Make all of the current scadutree fragments/revered spirit ashes considered "greater", and have them give you a large boost of like 3-4 levels. Then replace a majority of the redundant items like smithing stones and cookbooks with "lesser" fragments/ashes that only serve to level your blessing up once with an increase in required items to get more levels the higher your level is, like how it is in the current version.
I dunno, maybe that isn't as good a fix as I think, I'm not a game designer. I feel like they came so close to solving the issue of DLC scaling but made one small mistake and it snowballed into several aspects of the DLC feeling underwhelming. It sucked being walled by Gaius because I knew I needed to get the fragments past his arena, but feeling like he did way too much damage even with a decent blessing level. I beat him after a while but by that point I'd gone back to Dark Souls III and don't know when I'll get around to finishing SotE because I'm so burnt out on it.
nothing changed from oblivion to skyrim to fallout 4 to starfield.
we just raised our standards. bethesda always made dogwater games, buggy, broken games
Just finished the land of shadow part and I feel like you give the legacy dungeons too much credit. I think the shadow keep is the only area that deserves the legacy dungeon denomination. Belurat and Enir-Illim come close, but they don’t measure up to the 6 main legacy dungeons of the main game. I found this to be extremely disappointing given the fact that as you mentioned, the open world was even more empty than the main game. Even then, I don’t think shadow keep reaches the heights of say Stormveil Castle, Crumbling Farum Azula or Lyendell. The enemy variety is too low. My hopes for a more condensed map and even better legacy dungeons were just not met.
Glad you mentioned blood and wine because it is a DLC of similar scope to SOTE and yet it turned out to be better for half the price.
I certainly hope I don’t grow disdainful of the makeup of Fromsoft games like I did with Bethesda. I played Fallout 4 and suddenly couldn’t remember what I enjoyed about those games in the first place. Haven’t touched anything Bethesda since. I became disillusioned w their design philosophy as a whole because of their refusal to evolve it over time. Is Fromsoft not comparable when the same camera issues persist across 15 years of games for example.
Couldn't agree more.
Man...i get saying how the dlc is disappointing.
But it feels pretty unfair to harp on how FromSoft has fallen off.
I mean, theres been plenty of evidence that theyre interested in new directions. Sekiro back in 2019, Armored Core last year, the interview you brought up at the end of the video. Mikizaki even said he wasnt going to try to try to follow the success from Elden Ring- which even the base game was a cool experience.
This is the same group that ended Dark Souls at 3 of their own volition evwn though the fans would have, at the time, wanted more.
And with the DLC, from my impression(havent played it) i think they did an admirable job at trying to reinvent their method of making a DLC to be true to what Elden Ring was about.
Im not a FS fanboy, nor have i played the DLC. It just doesnt seem fair, all things considered
I'm not bothered that there is boss just as hard as Malenia in the DLC. I'm bothered that it is specifically the final boss, the one a player needs to beat to bring the main story of the DLC to a close.
Contrast this with the base game, where not only is Malenia not the final boss, she's a secret boss sequestered away in a hidden zone that most casual players might never even find without looking up a guide. The equivalent in the DLC should have been something like Midra, not Miquella's Consort.
...
Otherwise, however, Ivery much agree that one of the bigger problems with the DLC isn't necessarily the raw difficulty of the bosses in a vacuum, but rather in contrast to how increasingly easy the level navigation an regular enemies are. In older games just getting to the boss was half the challenge of beating the game, but now it feels like the bosses are the ONLY challenge and it's made the whole experience feel lopsided at best, if not entirely disjointed at worst.
It used to be in older games that as long as my build was good enough to reach a boss, it would also be good enough to beat that boss. In Shadows of the Erdtree, however, for the first time ever I found myself having to juggle between two separate gear loadouts. During exploration I felt still free entirely free to experiment and customize my character for flavor, but during boss fights I increasingly felt the need to resort to only the most mechanically optimized options. By the time I finally scraped out a win against the DLC's final boss, I derived no real satisfaction because my character no longer really felt like my own.
Yeah, the whole combat formula probably needs a full overhaul, but honestly, I'd settle for just a more balanced overall experience that doesn't rely entirely on over the top bosses and instead puts some of the challenge back into basic level design and the standard enemies which populate it. I want a game that teaches me the lessons I need to learn throughout the entire the journey, not a cakewalk that does nothing to prepare me for a final exam difficulty spike.
If all I cared about was super tough bosses, there are boss rush games that cut out everything else in-between entirely.
There’s just very little reason to even fight the dlc final boss. The items are meh, you *definitely* don’t need the runes, the “ending” is empty, and up until 1.14 the fight itself was mid to terrible.
The 1.14 patch did a lot to make the fight more enjoyable, but even then it’s still a lower point for the dlc.
It's the horse and the open world. You can just run past anything that threatens you. Somehow this feels like it extended into the dungeons themselves. Feels like there's hardly any level design in SotE.
@@Scowleasy: It's not really about whether the rewards or the ending itself are underwhelming. It's about having closure, about being able to finish what was started.
It's fine for Melania to be so hard some players might never beat her, and that the rewards for doing so arguably aren't worth the effort, because she's side content. It would be a whole different thing entirely if Elden Beast was that hard.
Ostensibly some people might try to argue the entire DLC is just side content, but the difference is that unlike Melenia, it's side content with a separate price of admission.
@@EmeralBookwise except there isn’t any closure. We just get a lame cutscene of something we’ve already been told multiple times.
After you beat PCR the first time, there really isn’t any reason to do it again.
@@Scowleasy: The closure isn't about the cutscene, it's about finishing the game and being able to close the book on the story without nagging feeling that giving up would have.
I will entirely agree that having done it once, however, I feel no desire to ever do it again.
Great video! I especially liked the lore criticisms. The dlc's world felt unsatisfying and empty for me. I was desperatrely waiting for the lore to get better but the ending just made it much much worse and I didn't like how they handled Miquella's plotline tbh.
Lots of cool threads but it feels like the pinnacle of Miyazaki's "half-trabslated book" philosophy.
I personally love that style, but I totally get why people don't care for it.
Ha! Joke's on all of you, I saw star wars in Episode order. Of course I knew who Darth Vader was to Luke, and I spent all of Episode IV pretty mad at Obi-wan for not telling the poor kid.
A satisfying pay off for a bunch of questions from the base game, all of our questions answered... Yeah you must be new to the fromsoft game's
Bad take after bad take, same with the whole comments section. I’ve seen this exact video from Feeble king and Joseph Anderson before. “Boss too hard, world too empty, story not make sense”. It’s all the same. Almost everything you complained about can be applied to every souls game there ever was, your just too lazy to care about the game, learn it, and find out what it has to offer. Wasn’t a problem the first Dark Souls.
Bro lost me at Bayle is a great boss. Idk how you can complain about the camera on Dancing Lion and come to that conclusion.
I agree and could expand the lore chapter of the video. But i dont because I'm lazy and I want to sleep
AMAZING!!
A vid this long will take me 2 days to watch but I've gotten through the early part of the critique. I agree that the scadu tree blessings are poopy. I like the barren landscapes better than the base game though. I hard agree with your Lore critiques so far.
"For From Software, that point (stagnation) is Shadow of the Erdtree."
By whose estimation, exactly??? What? Lost me.
I completely agree with your sentiment at the beginning. I grew up with Morrowind, still one of my all time favs. When Fallout 4 dropped, it was good, but it just didn't feel the same. And then Starfield drops. Played all the Souls games, Elden Ring is great, but I had similar feelings to Fallout 4 with ER and the DLC. It's great but how many times can I dodge roll counter against mostly reused/slightly modified assets?
"at this point you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with elden ring"
Yes you're right I have worms in my brain so I am wondering that. Video far too smarty for me
I feel not pessimistic about the DLC but came out with the conclusion that this is indeed the answer to the question, “How much further can the souls formula increase the challenge formula before it stops being fun?”
SOTE is the peak of the souls formula as it is today. I believe FROM knows this and I have faith in them. Myazaki said it himself he doesn’t really like doing sequels. So I have every bit of confidence they will try something new and innovative like. They have a great track record in this field so am, as always, interested in what they do next.
EDIT: the Deflecting Hard Tear turned my Samurai build into Wolf from Sekiro. And the Striking Shields (particularly the magic one) is just divine. Peak Tear I agree. Oh and script weapons still suck😂
I really don't get these comments... just go play sekiro?
new combat system? are you kidding me, ER is my first souls like game, the combat in ER is perfect.
The lens you are viewing from is as you said your 1st exp w/ Souls but for us Vet players who have grown w/ the evolution of the games is an entirely different lens. There's an ole saying, "ignorance is bliss" I'm glad you are able to enjoy it but for a lot of us vets the combat is broken.
@@heyguyslolGAMING This is something I should have clarified in the video for sure. My perspective is very much that of a veteran and while I stand by it, I didn't fully consider how that might come across to the many fans that are just discovering the games for the first time through ER
Happy to say there’s plenty of previous games for you to play, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but unfortunately if your argument wouldn’t apply to a Call of Duty clone, it doesn’t apply here. I may never have played Pokemon, but that doesn’t excuse every new Pokemon game having the same gameplay as the previous one with little to no fundamental changes for the 38th time in a row. Any given kind of game may be a new experience for people who have never experienced the genre, but a huge number of players are not new to this anymore, and the existence of players not familiar with the combat doesn’t excuse a lack of development or creativity in a very old formula that, by many people’s assertion, is reaching its limits with regard to being able to design new encounters that both aren’t repeats of bosses that have been done before, and yet aren’t pushovers.
In a game with base defensive mechanics limited to rolling, jumping and sprinting (even being kind and including guarding), each with very distinct timing and/or stamina limitations, this lack of development is starting to yield bosses that in the name of difficulty start to require, negate or remove all intuition from even the player tactics that used to be niche skill expression, such as positioning close to or behind bosses, strafing attack, or even poising through certain attacks to gain an extra attack on the boss; they do this by means of huge damage, inconsistent visuals of things like explosions, long and sometimes inescapable combos and huge health pools that make single mistakes over a long fight potentially deadly to inflate the difficulty of learning, ultratracking, insanely fast or comparatively unreactable moves or combos, disengages that jump the boss too far away for a counterattack, unnatural gotcha delays, incredibly precise roll timings, AOEs or chunky hitboxes on every hit, and sliding across arenas with standard attacks in the name of baiting out the all-powerful roll rather than giving even so much as a hint of what’s happening and what to do about it. If the only thing a boss can challenge is your memory and execution of a roll timing, and occasionally your roll direction and spacing, then if we don’t get at least an overhauled defensive system at this point, we’ll either run out of unique bosses, or fair ones, and neither eventuality seems all that fun to people who’ve played the last five-six games.
@@TheRedHood64i think you got tired of some things, and it's not games fault, it's normal to need different gameplay after a while.
I don't know your content well sorry, but if you didn't you should try to randomize these games, to fully appreciate and vary the difficulty
Perfect is... Quite a stretch. Safe to say a new combat system would be refreshing. Sekiro is one of my favourites precisely because of the combat.
How empty the world is never really bothered me because it made sense. If the lands between is a dying world, the land of shadow is a dead world thats been dead for a long time. It gave SotE this really ominous feeling like you werent supposed to see this place. Its hard to put the feeling in words but it gave a sense of "oh shit... some really bad stuff went on here". I get how you feel though cause I felt that way about both finger ruins and over all the rewards for exploration in the dlc were pretty bad.
In other souls games the worlds were dying yet they didnt feel as empty. I ngl thought the finger ruins were really cool, because they were clearly just a cool landscape that doesnt have much in it, like radahns arena. On the other hand if you explore a castle or something and find a cookbook or a talisman that lowers your hp to 3 but increases your arcane by 2.7 on a very rainy day while a half moon is out and you havent mowed your grass for a few weeks, it can understandably not be very great.
Did you really say a whopping 35 hour first play through of Elden ring….that tells me all I need to know
Says more about you than it does the uploader lol.
Great commentary bro I mostly agreed with everything except a few points. But over all these were my thoughts, good critique.
35 hours? It took me 75 😂
Took me ~50
You want the real problem of elden rings is? The fact that is the only good open world out there. Why? Simple they are forcing themselves to fill everything to the brim, and thus we get a lot of empty space copy pasta, and with the hole thing bigger and more. We end up with lack of uniqueness.
FromSoft excel in small projects compare to this open world shenanigans. It took them long, to do the base game and even longer to poop the dlc, while rush, cuz faking investors want there money returns now no later.
The really base popular experience came from the small projects.
Elden ring is a big successful flawed project because it allow new players to join, do to no just word of mouth, but for the fact that it had media boost, now we have players that mite not like previous or new soul'sborne because they will expect another elden ring asking for more rather than unique..., glad that the director said that this is the current last open world project from a while, so they be focus on smaller project. If they don't get Sony cock block that tiz.
Saying the base game did a good job filling its world is a bit... I find that rather kiddie-gloved and disingenuous in a way, considering the immense amount of recycling and the nearly copypaste nature of so many of the "attractions" scattered around the world. Limgrave, yeah, okay - but beyond Limgrave, the quality dropped hard.
It still does a pretty good job generally imo - bar mountaintop of the giants.
The recycling in the base game wasn't that bad except for the snow areas which had almost no new unique enemies. It's more disappointing with the dlc cos they just reused base game enemies like dragons again.
These low-quality attack videos with low views are definitely not the general concensus around Elden Ring. The fact that this junk keeps showing up on my feed makes me wonder if these are just coordinated media attacks. There's a big world of AAA devs and social influencers that arent cool with companies like Fromsoft, and they do these kinds of things. Corporate warfare is real.
Just Joseph Anderson wannabees who follow his style of nitpicking, sorry I mean critique.
Elden Ring fans proving once against that they really are the most utterly and absolutely insufferable of From Soft's entire fanbase.
Ah yes, the classic ‘no one can criticise something I like, they must be paid by a mysterious corporation!’ Get a grip, people are allowed to have takes on its flaws, even if you don’t agree with them.
@@christopherlyndsay8611 while yeah the corporation thing is a reach and yeah that no one is above criticism, it rubs me the wrong way when a lot of these hour long videos try to pass of their opinions as objective. not saying they need to preface everything they say with "in my opinion" but maybe be less condescending to the devs (not like they'll ever watch these videos anyway) about problems in their games especially when some of the problems are the fault of the video essayist misunderstanding something.
@@kokomonkey7388 None of these vids claim to be objective. Most of them even say it's their opinions. You can criticise the game and the company's future directions. It's not like he was insulting them.
glazing*** not a critique for SURE.
It is dated and clunky. Fromsoft is a one trick pony, and other studios are starting to produce similar games of better quality. Fromsoft is losing the race, because of their refusal to evolve. Elden Ring is Dark Souls 3 with a jump button. They are doing the same thing as Bethesda, and just reskinning the same game over and over, hoping nobody is paying enough attention.
people this dumb are why we have problems in the world, ignoring the fact that fromsoft made a crazy good Sci Fi robot level game. Sekiro, and the fact that Elden Ring is not just “dArK SoUls 3 wIth A jUmP bUttoN” but rather a fucking open world game with quintuple the amount of combat diversity
AC6 disproves this.
Sekiro disproves that they're not a 1 trick pony. They can innovate but choose not to.
Comparing Fromsoftware with Bethesda is nonsensical. Bethesda's issue was not "stagnation", it's that their games lacked quality to begin with, the best Bethesda game wasn't even made by Bethesda. Fallout 4 was a massive downgrade compared to Fallout New Vegas in terms of story quality, role playing and RPG mechanics, so Bethesda games didn't just stagnate, they downgraded, because Bethesda couldn't do as good a job as Obsidian. This is not the case with Fromsoftware, they are the best at what they do, and continue to polishing the combat with each game, and all of them have their fair share of amazing bosses despite some misses, the problems you mentioned with some of the SOTE bosses are just a few of the misses (including overtuned difficulty), this is not an indication that there's no way to move forward with the combat.
If you can't see the comparison, then you're blind. NV wasn't even brought up yet the dickriders will always try to bring it up (when it's mediocre at best).
I'm gay and even I agree with this.
That Alex Jones bath water is legit AF.
I 💯 agree with you about making shit up as they go. That's what it felt like.
Anyone can see that From has hit the limits of what souls combat can achieve, but also, NO OTHER IP in all of gaming has the build variety and player expression that comes from souls games. Nothing even comes close. I see a of people in the comments talking about how the combat needs to evolve (devolve) into a faster paced, action oriented experience. I hope From never goes that route. I play these games to get away from stuff. Yes it has its place but pulling off a near infinite air combo on a fodder enemy gets boring REALLY quickly. From has definitely reached a crossroads with SOTE but I’m confident that the great minds over there can figure out a direction to take the combat system that’ll maintain the core principles and gameplay, while giving the player even more options.
I think the DLC was a oice of art, especially the map, my god thr density andintricacy of the physical world is brilliant. Can i somewhat agree that the formula is (deliberate choie of words) "every so slightly approaching stale" yes i could agree with that. But we all wanted some more ER and what rhey delivered with soe was fantastic. I believe with ER and the dlc they have taken the souls model to its Nth degree. I dont think we can argue that at this point. Their formula has spawned its own genre of games for gods sake. And they may well create a game that adapts or follows the skeleton of tjeir souls formula in future that reaches the same level of brilliance as the titles we know and love. However i believe ER and soe was Froms way of saying, its been good, heres our best and biggest attempt at the formula weve used fo many times... Now were gonna look at other styles of games
I wish they would make a Sekiro dlc. I don't see how they could innovate Sekiro's combat any further to make a whole new game.
I liked shadow of the erdtree. A lot of the new weapons are super cool. I wasn't as stoked with the armors how ever there were a couple cool ones. The scadutree fragment system was a unique idea I didn't think anything was wrong with it. I think the biggest improvement was the more direct narrative. I wouldn't want the lore items and hints to go away but it would be nice to get a more direct mane story in these games. Also a quest log of some form or another as well some kind of indicator after you complete a dungeon. the last thing that from soft could fix are there menus I have always hated there menus and the pop up item notifications. As far as difficulty go's I can take it or leave it I don't really care either way unless it gets so difficult because there always trying to out do there last title that it's unplayable. But shadow of the erdtrer was pretty damn good I mean the size of it was incredible I thought it was going to be a quick in and out but boy was I wrong. Not everything needs to be a souls like game but if game companies learned anything from fromsoft it should be providing there customers with games that have the same attention to detail and provide them massive dlc with high quality content. Anyway that's my thoughts 🤔 definitely a good buy .
The Scadu Avatar is weak against frenzy flame
Yeah, just fire in general.
Midra was also my favorite boss in the dlc, with Mesmer a close second.
Bayle would've been number 1, if he had more health.
I don't think we need to worry about FromSoftware's future innovations in souls-like games. Through past titles like Bloodborne and Sekiro, they've clearly demonstrated the formulas and key elements of the genre while achieving their goals through different gaming experiences. The success of Elden Ring lies in its lack of restrictions on player experience; you could ask hundreds of people, and most would have different initial experiences. However, I believe this also highlights some weaknesses in the souls-like genre and paves the way for other studios to make significant strides in their own souls-like games.
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In other words, let them cook!
What part of the lore is a mess? Also FromSoft lore especially in soulsborne genre is always disjointed you have to piece together 95% of it.
I agree to your critique that the combat system has reached its limit they can of course make another game and include more QoL features like what Lies of P and make boss fights with larger enemies something more interesting than just hitting the legs or head.
Not something good most likely lol
Your introduction is literally a copypaste of Joseph Andersons conclusion to his Shadow Of The Erdtree Critique...
Funny you point that out. His vid dropped right as I was in the middle of production on this. I had already written and recorded that intro by then but contemplated changing it for that exact reason. I ultimately decided it wasn't worth completely restructuring my intro just because another creator made a similar comparison. It's understandable how it may have come across that way, but I had no intentions of copying anyone. Maybe the comparison just isn't as unique as I thought it would be 🤷
@@TheRedHood64 Thanks for clarifying. If this is true would it be worth mentioning in the description or something? Stuff like that calls into question the critical/creative process of a video. Just an observation.
Idk man, it just seems like a very minor case of skill issue.
Which is like fine, use summons magic or overpowered builds, nobody is gonna stop you but if you want to learn some of the best bosses ever conceived thn you have to give them time.
I'm biased BTW and this DLC was specifically tailor made for me. Like it felt like Miyazaki came to my home, looked in my mind and thn made skibidi erdtree. It's just tht good.
And if this is the kind of future from soft is visioning, I'm all for it. I don't care wht anyone else feels. It's for me god fukin damn it.
IMO the DLC made the base game unplayable for me. Every boss on the DLC including Rhadan was a fair boss. The dodges were intuitive and the weapon variety made everything good even better. In the base game we instead have fire giant rolling arround the entire arena and spamming projectiles, Godskin duo which is just a pain to fight, Maliketh being unpredictable af with multiple atks that look identical but have different followups, and mogh phase 2 flying arround the entire arena and stalling for bloodflame bleed procs. Mallenia is mostly fair but waterfowl is stll a bitch to dodge. Now to the DLC; Dancing lion: easy af to dodge, Rellana: phase 1 is a joke and phase 2 is phase 1 but with 3 more atks all of wich are free dodges, Furnace golems: Just stay between his legs, jump the stomps and run away from the jumps. Mesmer: His combo is a much easier version of waterfowl to dodge and he gives you arround 3 full seconds of end lag on it. Romina: Did anyone genuenly struggle with this one? Midra: Mogh phase 1 (the fun half) but even better. Skidootree Avatar: A dragon disguised as a tree. I switched to a longer weapon to get headshots easier. Even w/o that his absurd fire weakness makes him really easy and his ground atks can be jumped. Mitir: The adds die in 1 hit and her atks are really fun to dodge. Bayle: Did anyone dislike this fight? Orphan of Koz w a horse: Remember there is a jump button and the fight is trivial. You can read the atks that are coming from beind you by looking past the boss. Commander Gaius: Base game Rhadan but better in every way. Rhadan: I was expecting to struggle a lot cause everyone said he was too dificult and such so i optimized the f out of my build and he just died in 6 tries. Overall easier than the base game. My build was backhand blades w 40 Faith, 80 Dex.
I don't see the parallel between Bethesda and FromSoft. One has released 1 exceptional game (Morrowind) in between 3 good games (Daggerfall, Oblivion, Fallout 3) and then it only went downwards from there. The other has released 6 exceptional games (DS, DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, AC6) and 1 good one in between (DS2). And the Elden Ring DLC was wonderful. Yes, one day FromSoft will dissapear. But they got 100x more talent than Bethesda ever had.
Bethesda been running on morrowind hype for years. I finished oblivion but it was pretty lackluster. Skyrim was more of the same. I doubt I'll pick up the next one. I tried playing Skyrim a few years ago and it was just to similar to every other reskinned game they make.
I love that From Soft knew that they couldn't make the DLC better than the base game, so they just slapped Sekiro on top and it's a banger😂😂
What’s next? Hopefully not another trash open world.
ER is the easiest game by far because YOU CAN BECOME GOD WHILE BARELY TOUCHING ANY BOSSES.
I feel blind hearing people talk about these bosses.
So many people playing with a post patch Scadu level of 15+ and turning the bosses into jokes, yet they still complain.
Like *BOY!* you are fighting baby numbers, making the bosses hit you with pillows!
This isn’t even the best DLC by Fromsoft.
And now that Cross Slash is gone, somehow people went from making claims that Radahn was the peak of difficulty, to now calling him a joke.
These people I mentioned are CLOWNS, because there are many MANY changes that are more important than Cross Slash. This community of Wanna Be tryhards just couldn’t understand the simple concept of positioning.
Cerulean Coast is one of the most pathetic levels of any game in the last decade. No excuse for that shit lol. Shaman Village isn't much better. The DLC is huge in terms of landmass but 35% of it is empty space. That and the final boss are the two biggest flaws of the DLC. I rate it an 8/10 but if not for those things it'd be a 10. Small focused games are better than large games full of empty space. The latter wastes your time.
UA-camrs who are bad at games and complaining is very entertaining content. Keep it up, dude 🙂
You do realize he critiques the game as well as glaze it, right?
In summary, he liked it, but he doesn't think it's peak. As someone who begs his friends to let him buy them From Soft games, I respect his opinion.
And if you need to feel his opinion invaldated, he said he beat the DLC 4 times. That sh*t ain't easy.
@@courier6640 At level 1 with no blessings. That is an insane achievement.
Bro most of this boils down to one thing - You are burned out on these games. Elden Ring has only JUST brought Fromsoft and the souls gameplay loop to the mainstream. It's not anywhere near stale yet.
Why should he or I or anyone care what happens in the mainstream? I was disappointed in the game. That's all I care about. Hell I liked AC6 better, and even Lies of P. That's an off-brand knockoff product.
It's fine not to care. I do that too. But I don't keep consuming content about it and hang around with people who do.
If you don't care you don't care. It could be burnout. It could be the game is bad. To you it doesn't matter, so you also don't have criticism to put up. You're explicitly not going there. But that means you hanging out here is pointless.
Subjective bias matters when someone is trying to present critique. If a critic presents a whole rationale, when the reality is they just don't care and aren't engaging with the information. There is this no logical or real world connection to the observations and the whole thing becomes a waste of everyone's time, because there's no practical value to anyone but that critic. And the only meaningful action is to disengage. You can't blame something you already dislike in your gut for giving you bad experiences! And if you can't explain it beyond that, nobody is learning anything truthful about the game from you.
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS What didn't you like about the game?
@@psychoticbreaks167justletm4 This is just a masturbatory diatribe.
@@I-ONLY-BUILD-MECHS-AND-DUSTERS actually it's interesting that you mention Lies of P because I'm curious if competition from games like that will end up being good for Fromsoft overall. Lies of P is the first TRUE soulslike with such success and positive reception unless I'm forgetting something, and competition breeds creativity.
Yeah I absolutely disagree that FromSoft needs to change their combat system. This is a case of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it." Elden Ring is their most popular product by a long shot, why would you risk ruining that by drastically changing your combat system, simply for change sake?
This is why games like Monster Hunter are special. Those devs stuck to their roots and just keep refining what they had, because it was great gameplay from the start. There was no need to drastically change that combat system. Same for souls/ER titles. Not saying that they should never put out anything but souls games, but changing the foundation of souls games when it's a tried and true formula would be very unwise to put it nicely.
Also you said with the combat system being so old, it limits what FromSoft can do from enemy design standpoing. ...Have you seen the stuff we are fighting in Elden Ring? Lol they aren't limited at all when it comes to what enemies can do.
this video is garbage
This video is not garbage
That's such a idiotic take like comparing apples and oranges, Bethesda has had ups and downs and their formula between skyrim fallout and now starfield haven't realy changed up, the difference with fromsoft is they have made 4 different series all with different playstyles, other than dark souls u can't say it's the same bloodborne is it's own thing, sekiro too, and elden ring is so much depth u could get lost and dozens of ways to play, your basically just saying ooh fromsoft has peaked now it's time to come down, the experience between game is widely varied that no one game feels the same, yet Bethesda games have the same overall gameplay other than the setting, game studios make garbage once in a while but this notion that it's stale is a hot take, fromsoft other than ds hasn't made a game that mirrors the other
"elden ring is so much depth u could get lost and dozens of ways to play" He's talking about the core mechanics that dictate how FS can design its bosses. All their souls bosses r designed around dodge rolling which clearly has reached its limits with this dlc.
I'm sorry but pre-nerf cross slash was still way better than waterfowl. I would rather have a 3rd of dmg than get one shot by a move with a sh1t telegraph. Plus she can do it as many times as she wants in each phase.
@@anonisnoone6125 nah, waterfowl is not as bad. she uses it 2-3 times per fight max, it gives you plenty of time to realise that she's doing it, and there are several ways to avoid it.
you can avoid it by literally just running and jumping, then rolling through the rest, but if you can't do that you can use a shield to block it or use an ash of war like vow of the indomitable or BH step, the move gives you plenty of time to pull a shield or dagger out. it's also possible to literally just spam roll away from it if you're using light roll.
but yeah, running and jumping is by far the best way and is also the intended way, it works every single time.
the issue with cross slash is that if you knew how to dodge it, you would need to completely change your entire playstyle for the whole fight to accomodate for it, but if you know how to dodge waterfowl then the move might as well not exist because of how easily you can dodge it and how rarely she does it. waterfowl doesn't force you to change your playstyle if you know at least one of the 5+ methods to dodge it.
@@ramen3643 She's not limited to doing it 2-3 times at all. I don't know where u got that info from. Some people have even said she's done it up to 5 times in 1 phase and sometimes can do it back to back.
"you can avoid it by literally just running and jumping" This is what I do. The problem arises when I'm in an animation and then she decides to give me a "fuck you" and gives me no time to run away, especially if I'm using a greatsword or colossal weapon.
I hate that she heals on shields. It's just a big fuck you to the players who play like that and who actually want to progress through the fight rather than having to delete half her hp again.
Waterfowl forces you to play the passive which is the problem. The whole fight is literally built around expecting this 1 move which makes it less fun, same with cross slash. And sometimes if she's literally just standing there and you decide to finally do something, she can pull it out. And it's even worse in phase 2 cos she's as aggressive as dlc bosses and constantly chases u. Add to the fact that her wings make it hard to tell if she's actually starting waterfowl or not cos she jumps around a lot.
It's a shame cos all her other moves r actually fun to dodge, except maybe the clones, but even those I'm fine with cos they at least have decent timings.
@anonisnoone6125 I should've been more specific but didn't mean it was limited to 2-3 times, that's just the average, she rarely does it more than 3 times, phase 1 goes down pretty quick so she usually only gets to do it once, she also rarely does it in phase 2 since she has so many other moves she can cycle between, so she will likely only do it once there as well, but the phase lasts longer so you could get her to do a 2nd one depending on your RNG.
also idk what tf you're doing, but I no hit her using a collosal weapon and I could always dodge it even when I was recovering from a charged R2, the only reason she would catch you with it is if you were R1 spamming and hit her after she already started the attack.
Rng is getting old af in souls games also I love beast claw
as a blanket statement: i'm *siiiick and tired* of from soft's same engine and player character from 2011. i mean if you really think about it, elden ring is a 2016 game with 2022 world and enemies. the player character is so incredibly boring, weak, and nothing is ever balanced around anything more than R1 dodge R1 dodge
monster hunter games have really made me notice how samey, one note, and overall basic their combat is in elden ring. ALL the enemies do is spew out attacks. it isn't dynamic, it doesn't actually change anything when a new phase is hit, it's another set of animations to constantly puke on the player. it is a dodge button simulator
the DLC is really where my issues came out. i've always had a bit of an issue with ER because of multiple things but until the DLC i called it one of the best games ever. well, the DLC has shown me that as good as they are, there are some seriously outdated and *shit* things they refuse to learn from. quests are the perfect example. no one actually likes googling 17 times just to know where to go. and not to mention the fact that every. single. NPC. just betrays you. that is the only fucking thing these guys write about. betrayal. ooooo boy wonder whats nex- betrayal. okay how about thi- griffith. alriiight well maybe the next one will b- another betrayal. like okay man, i genuinely do not give a fuck about the regurgitated storytelling anymore. skip through that damn dialogue ASAP lol. useless content at this point. they are like ubisoft with their storytelling. doing the same exact *damn* thing over and over and over and over which wraps right back around to it's combat. they all just feel like lines of code at this point
please don't get comfortable from soft. you guys *ARE* fallable. the cracks were hard to see with sekiro, bloodborne, DS3 but with elden ring it's like i'm walking over them
lastly, this DLC just makes me assume they care much more about disrespecting the player and making sure they fail 45 times so they can go 'aw gee pops what a hard boss!' when in reality the player is just trudging through the loads and loads of bullshit thrown their way and we got...a dodge! an R1! a jumping R2! and now, a whole 5 minutes of deflecting cause we didn't wanna balance the DLC around a deflecting talisman! :0
p.s. CDPR was just being nice